Refineries suggest a different path for Biden administration to boost production
American fossil fuel companies responded on Wednesday to resident Joe Biden’s June 14 letter that accused them of profiteering and driving up gas prices during a “time of war.”
Biden’s letter blamed gas prices, which have skyrocketed from $2.53 per gallon when he took office to $5.00 today, on “Putin’s war of aggression” and greedy corporations, ignoring his own efforts to suppress American fossil fuel production. Since taking power in January 2021, the Biden administration has worked relentlessly across multiple agencies to carry out his campaign pledge in which he stated, “I guarantee you we are going to end fossil fuel.”
Biden’s note to energy executives put the blame for today’s surging gas prices on refineries and the “high profit margins for refining oil into gasoline,” stating that when crude oil was $120 per barrel in March, similar to today’s prices, “the price of gas at the pump was $4.25 per gallon. Today, gas prices are 75 cents higher.” The difference, he claimed, was due to refiners’ profit margins, which have tripled since then. Simultaneously, White House Spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre slammed U.S. oil companies for failing to do their “patriotic duty.”
Responding to Biden’s letter, the American Petroleum Institute and the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers stated (pdf) that U.S. refineries are currently operating at 94 percent capacity, among the highest utilization rates in the world, and that prices for oil products are set on world markets based on global supply and demand, not by American companies. According to the Energy Information Administration, refining costs made up 14 percent of the total price of gasoline in 2021. The remainder includes 54 percent for crude oil, 16 percent for distribution, and 16 percent for taxes. Escalating prices have driven up the share of crude oil to 60 percent of the total this month.
Regarding Biden’s complaint that U.S. refineries had pushed gas prices higher by reducing their capacity by 800,000 barrels a day, industry representatives responded that half of the refineries that have shut did so because they are being converted to renewable fuel production. “These investments cannot be easily or quickly undone,” they stated.
The fossil fuel industry, its consumers, and its investors have responded to administration policies designed to reduce production and capacity. This includes federal incentives to replace gasoline-powered cars and trucks with electric vehicles (EVs), cancellation of oil leases in Alaska, canceling new lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico, and canceling the $9 billion Keystone Pipeline, for which construction was already underway.
On March 11, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reinstated California’s authority to enforce its own emissions standards for cars and trucks, “which other states can also adopt and enforce,” according to an official statement. “With this authority restored, the EPA will continue partnering with states to advance the next generation of clean vehicle technologies.”
Kathleen Sgama, President of the Western Energy Alliance, stated in a June 16 Fox News interview that “we keep hearing that he’s working like the devil to bring down energy prices and that is anything but the truth.” She noted that there are about 5,900 development leases and 3,000 permits that are currently being held up by environmental litigation.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) recently announced the creation of its Office of Environmental Justice, which “will engage all Justice Department bureaus, components and offices in the collective pursuit of environmental justice.” In addition, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued a ruling on March 21 that all listed companies must issue audited reports on their greenhouse gas emissions including that of their suppliers.
The SEC action underscored the administration’s alignment with progressive investment managers, pension funds, banks, insurers, and finance ministers who joined together in global clubs like Climate Action 100+, the Global Investors Statement to Governments on Climate Change, the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative, and the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero. Members of these clubs have signed joint pledges to reduce or eliminate financing for the fossil fuel industry.
The sum effect of these policies has been a chilling effect on fossil fuel investment. The last major refinery built in America was in 1977, long before the current administration, but Chevron CEO Mike Wirth stated that he does not expect any new refineries will be built in the United States for economic and political reasons.
“We’ve seen refineries closed,” Wirth stated. “We’ve seen refineries being repurposed to become bio refineries. And we live in a world where the policy, the stated policy of the U.S. government is to reduce demand for the products that refiners produce.” Currently, the United States has 129 operable refineries.
Many in the fossil fuel industry see current gas prices as the result of a deliberate and continuing effort by the Biden administration to force Americans to switch from oil and gas to renewable energy.
Biden recently praised oil price hikes as “an incredible transition that is taking place that, God willing, when it’s over, we’ll be stronger and the world will be stronger and less reliant on fossil fuels.” And Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm stated that rising oil prices were “an exclamation point” demonstrating the need to switch from oil to wind and solar, previously advising Americans that “if you drive an electric car, this would not be affecting you.”
“They want this current situation,” Daniel Turner, Executive Director of Power the Future, an energy advocacy group, told The Epoch Times. “They want the status quo, they just don’t want the political fallout from it. The Biden administration needs to understand that if they’re going to pursue this agenda, then there are going to be consequences. It’s almost childlike naivete to think that you can have such a radical agenda and not have any consequences. It just shows how unserious and in-over-their-heads this administration is.”
But the progressive push to curtail fossil fuels is taking effect before renewables such as wind and solar are capable of filling the gap. Price hikes and shortages of gasoline, diesel, and fertilizer—an oil derivative—have had a ripple effect throughout the economy, hitting not only prices at the pump but also food prices, shipping and delivery expenses, and the cost of products that use plastic or other oil-based components.
To the many things that Democrats have blamed on Russia, including buying Facebook ads to support President Trump’s campaign and spreading misinformation, Biden has now added America’s inflationary crisis. “There is no question that Vladimir Putin is principally responsible for the intense financial pain the American people and their families are bearing,” he wrote.
He encouraged refineries to stand up to Putin and “take immediate actions to increase the supply of gasoline, oil, and diesel.” Biden said he has done his part by releasing supplies from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, allowing greater use of ethanol in gasoline, and using the Defense Production Act to provide inputs for energy production.
The fossil fuel industry responded to Biden that better solutions would include “promoting infrastructure development, addressing escalating regulatory compliance costs, allowing all technologies to compete to reduce emissions, modernizing fuels policies, and ensuring capital markets are functioning for all participants.”
Meanwhile, Biden has planned a trip to Saudi Arabia in July to implore oil producers there to boost their output. And the Biden administration has been working on a deal with Iran to end sanctions, allowing them to sell more oil as well.
“I wish the Biden administration made the same overtures and had the same spirit of collaboration with [American oil companies] that they have with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the Maduro government in Venezuela, and the Ayatollah in Iran,” Turner said. “The American oil and gas industry just gets threats and questioning of our patriotism.”
An armed would-be assassin’s alleged attempt on the life of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh last week is part of a wave of violence, arson, vandalism, and intimidation targeting pro-life groups and government officials since the leak last month of a draft Supreme Court opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade.
There have been more than three dozen such incidents directed at crisis pregnancy centers and churches in at least 20 states and Washington, D.C., according to a tally maintained by LifeNews.com, an anti-abortion site.
These include:
The firebombing of a pro-life pregnancy center in suburban Buffalo on June 7
An arson attack including Molotov cocktails against the headquarters of the pro-life Wisconsin Family Action center in Madison on May 8
Graffiti with the threat, “If abortion isn’t safe then you aren’t either,” spray-painted on the walls of centers in Washington state.
Extensive graffiti spray-painted on small rural evangelical churches in the Deep South, where some of the deacons protested their congregations were apolitical
A loosely organized group known as Jane’s Revenge claimed responsibility for several of the attacks, including the apparent arson in Wisconsin and Buffalo. The group, which sometimes attaches the Antifa “A” symbol to its pronouncements, has called for a “night of rage” over the pending Supreme Court decision, on a website called The Anarchist Library.
Another group, Ruth Sent Us–its name evoking the late liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg–has published the home addresses of conservative Supreme Court justices on Twitter. While not claiming responsibility for the disturbed gunman arrested near Kavanaugh’s house, it informed followers where his children and the children of Justice Amy Coney Barrett attend school.
Federal law expressly prohibits “pickets or parades … in or near a building or residence occupied or used by” any judge, and the House passed a bill this week to expand Supreme Court Police protection to justices’ families.
The rash of incidents and intimidating behavior is domestic terrorism, said Jim Harden, executive director of CompassCare, a nonprofit that operates the Buffalo pregnancy clinic and two others in upstate New York. Harden and his family relocated Sunday after social media accounts began seeking his home address.
“This is new,” he said. “It was the leak that really sparked this kind of activity.”
CompassCare also described the campaign against it as “abortion terrorism”–expressing heightened fears in a place where a white supremacist terrorist had murdered 10 people just weeks before. FBI agents visited the Buffalo clinic in response to the firebombing, but the organization has heard nothing since from federal authorities. Harden expressed skepticism that they–in contrast with local police–have taken the incident seriously.
“It’s been eerily silent,” Harden said.
In response to the May 2 leak of the draft opinion overturning Roe, which in 1973 legalized abortion nationally, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul earmarked $35 million in protection funds–but it was to safeguard abortion clinics, which have not been targets of attacks lately.
The Justice Department did not respond to questions from RealClearInvestigations about whether it has classified the multiple incidents as domestic terrorism or assigned a team to an investigation. Jane’s Revenge has claimed responsibility for the arson and vandalism attack on the Madison office of the Wisconsin Family Action center. Madison police also did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
There have been no arrests made in connection with any of the incidents, which began after Politico published the leaked draft opinion by conservative Justice Samuel Alito declaring that “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start.”
Harden compared the law enforcement response to the CompassCare attacks to the silence surrounding the person who may have leaked the draft opinion.
“There doesn’t appear to be anything going on in either case,” Harden said.
Chief Justice John Roberts said he had ordered an internal investigation that might identify the leaker, who presumably comes from a very small circle of people who would have had access to draft opinions.
Agreeing with Harden was Rebecca Anderson of 40 Days for Life, an anti-abortion group headquartered in Texas that has worked with an organization also targeted by Jane’s Revenge vandals: a Lynnwood, Washington, crisis pregnancy center called NextStep.
“I don’t think these acts of violence are being taken seriously as elected officials aren’t publicly condemning them,” she said. “The lack of response from the Justice Department leads one to believe that they pick and choose what qualifies as domestic terrorism based on politics. Our concern is that this will embolden abortion supporters to commit more violence against those who support life.”
In contrast, several anti-abortion figures told RealClearInvestigations, local police have been exemplary in their response and attitude.
“The police came immediately, and the DC Metro Police have been outstanding,” said Janet Durig, executive director of the Capital Pregnancy Center, which saw its front door splashed with red paint and the threatening graffiti tag left by Jane’s Revenge vandals, “If abortion isn’t safe then you aren’t either.”
“The local authorities are taking this very seriously and are investigating,” Harden said. “We had cameras trained at all the points of entry so there is videotape evidence.” Still, there has been no indication that local authorities have made any progress in their investigations.
The available evidence may be thin. Cameras did capture the vandals at NextStep in Lynnwood, Washington, but the assailant was bundled up like an Antifa extremist and nearly impossible to identify, according to NextStep Executive Director Heather Vasquez. “You could tell it was a woman,” she said.
The attacks on pro-life centers don’t square with an emphasis in major news outlets on the potential for attacks on abortion providers, which do not appear to have proliferated in the past several weeks.
“Abortion clinics are secured like fortresses,” a USA Today headline blared a week after the Politico story. “Advocates fear Roe ruling could spur new attacks.”
Reports about the spate of incidents involving anti-abortion centers by both CNN and the Washington Post have stressed that violence occurs on “both sides” of the abortion debate.
Planned Parenthood said late Tuesday that “we condemn violence and hatred in all forms” in a statement to RCI that emphasized “acts of violence, vandalism, and intimidation from anti-abortion activists and politicians” aimed at the organization’s “health center staff and patients.”
The pro-choice National Abortion Federation claimed in a 2020 report that abortion providers receive hundreds of death threats and thousands of “hate emails” and harassing phone calls each year. There has been one deadly incident at an abortion clinic since 2010–the 2015 attack on a Planned Parenthood facility in Colorado Springs that left three dead.
The anti-abortion movement does not have an equivalent database regarding threats received by pregnancy centers and religious organizations. In 2012, a left-wing activist entered the Family Research Council’s Washington, D.C. headquarters and shot and wounded a security guard.
While violence and intimidation have long characterized the abortion debate, Jane’s Revenge has promised to escalate the conflict. In its self-titled “First Communique” published after the Wisconsin attack, it declared:
“We have run thin on patience and mercy for those who seek to strip us of what little autonomy we have left. As you continue to bomb clinics and assassinate doctors with impunity, so too shall we adopt increasingly extreme tactics to maintain freedom over our own bodies. We are forced to adopt the minimum military requirement for a political struggle. Again, this was only a warning. Next time the infrastructure of the enslavers will not survive. Medical imperialism will not face a passive enemy. Wisconsin is the first flashpoint, but we are all over the US, and we will issue no further warnings.”
Peter Navarro, a White House adviser during the Trump administration, pleaded not guilty on June 17 to contempt of Congress charges.
Navarro was hit with the misdemeanor charges earlier in June, after declining to cooperate with the House of Representatives panel investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, breach of the U.S. Capitol, citing executive privilege due to his former position at the White House.
Navarro had been representing himself before the issue turned into a criminal one.
“Obviously being put in leg irons and having people want to put me in prison have changed matters,” Navarro told reporters outside the federal courthouse in Washington.
Navarro has also said he was denied a call to a lawyer after being arrested, which prosecutors have denied.
During Friday’s hearing, Navarro’s attorneys asked for the trial to take place in 2023 so that constitutional questions surrounding the privilege invocation could be resolved, WUSA-TV reported.
They also said Navarro plans to go on a tour beginning in September promoting his new book, “Taking Back Trump’s America: Why We Lost the White House and How We’ll Win it Back.”
Prosecutors said the government was ready to start the trial sooner.
U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta set the start of the trial for Nov. 17, but indicated that might not be the final trial date.
Navarro is the second former Trump adviser charged for refusing to cooperate with the House Jan. 6 panel.
Steve Bannon, who has also cited privilege, was the first.
Bannon’s motion to dismiss the charges was rejected by U.S. District Court Judge Carl Nichols, a Trump appointee, this week.
Bannon’s attempts to subpoena House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.)—who appointed every member of the panel—and members of the panel, have not yet been ruled upon.
Two other former Trump aides who have resisted working with the panel have not been charged.
The Department of Justice reportedly made the decision not to prosecute the former White House employees, Dan Scavino and Mark Meadows, despite exhortations from the panel that the men be prosecuted.
Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), chairman of the panel, and Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), chairwoman of the panel, said in a recent joint statement that they were puzzled by the move.
Thompson has said that Navarro’s testimony was being sought, as well as records he possessed, because he appeared to have information “directly relevant to the Select Committee’s investigation into the causes of the January 6th attack on the Capitol.”
Top Department of Justice (DOJ) officials have chastised the House of Representatives committee investigating the U.S. Capitol breach that took place on Jan. 6, 2021, for not handing over transcripts of interviews they’ve conducted.
“It is now readily apparent that the interviews the Select Committee conducted are not just potentially relevant to our overall criminal investigations, but are likely relevant to specific prosecutions that have already commenced,” Assistant Attorney Generals Kenneth Polite Jr. and Matthew Olsen wrote to the panel in a letter dated June 15 that was docketed in a federal court on Thursday.
“The Select Committee’s failure to grant the Department access to these transcripts complicates the Department’s ability to investigate and prosecute those who engaged in criminal conduct in relation to the January 6 attack on the Capitol,” they added later, urging the panel to reverse its position.
Matthew Graves, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, also signed the missive.
The office of Graves submitted the letter in a case against members of the Proud Boys who are charged with crimes in relation to Jan. 6.
Prosecutors said the DOJ “has neither access to the transcripts, nor the ability to compel Congress, a co-equal branch of government, to provide copies of the transcripts.” They also said they do not oppose pushing back the trial of the defendants due to the transcripts not being available.
Members of Congress pose for photos before the House select committee tasked with investigating the breach at the Capitol on Jan. 6 holds a hearing on Capitol Hill, Washington, D.C., on June 13, 2022. (Jabin Botsford/Pool via Getty Images)
“We got the letter yesterday, we are reviewing it, we will respond to it, but we are in the midst of conducting our hearings,” Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the chairman of the House panel on Thursday.
We have a program to get over, we have to get the facts and circumstances behind Jan. 6. We will work with them, but we have a report to do. We are not going to stop what we are doing to share the information that we have gotten so far with the Department of Justice. We have to do our work,” he added.
Thompson told reporters in May that he rebuffed a request from DOJ officials to turn over transcripts, describing them at the time as “the committee’s work product.”
The transcripts would be shared after the panel’s work is done, Thompson added.
Lawmakers on the panel cannot bring criminal charges, but they can make criminal referrals. Thompson said recently that the panel wouldn’t make any referrals; some members said that decision has not been made yet.
Attorney General Merrick Garland, head of the DOJ, told reporters this week that he is watching the hearings the panel is holding. “And I can assure you that the January 6 prosecutors are watching all of the hearings as well,” he said at an unrelated briefing in Washington.
Garland said the DOJ is working to “hold all perpetrators who are criminally responsible for Jan. 6 accountable, regardless of their level, their position, and regardless of whether they were present for the events of Jan. 6.”
The Jan. 6 House panel has interviewed over 1,000 people in its probe, including many who have not been charged with a crime. The list includes former President Donald Trump’s daughter and adviser, Ivanka Trump; former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani; and Bill Stepien, who managed Trump’s 2020 campaign.
The panel is holding hearings in June, with the third one of the month completed Thursday. Leaders have said they plan to issue a report by the end of the year.
The Justice Department official who investigates attacks on reproductive health care facilities has been a staunch critic of pro-life crisis pregnancy centers, dozens of which have been vandalized by abortion supporters over the past month.
Civil rights division chief Kristen Clarke criticized the centers following a Supreme Court decision issued in their favor in 2018. Clarke said the centers, which counsel pregnant women on alternatives to abortion, were “harmful” and “predatory” against women of color. She also referred to them with the hashtag, “ExposeFakeClinics.”
Clarke’s stance on the centers offers a potential explanation for the Justice Department’s refusal to investigate a string of attacks on pro-life centers since the May 2 leak of a draft Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) asked Attorney General Merrick Garland last week to investigate the incidents as acts of domestic terrorism. Garland has yet to open an investigation, even though he said on Sept. 6 he would investigate crimes against “reproductive health center[s]” under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE Act).
Clarke oversees investigations of potential FACE Act violations. She charged nine people under the statute in March for blocking the entrance to a Washington, D.C., abortion provider.
The attacks on crisis pregnancy centers, churches, and other pro-life organizations have run rampant since the leak of the Roe v. Wade draft opinion last month. Twenty-four crisis centers have been vandalized or set on fire since the leak, according to a group that tracks the incidents. In the latest assaults, a facility in Buffalo was firebombed on June 7. A center in Gresham, Ore., was hit with an “incendiary device” over the weekend.
The attacks are part of a broad intimidation campaign by left-wing activists upset that Roe may be overturned. Activists have protested outside the homes of conservative justices. A radical left-wing group hatched plans to shut down the Supreme Court using tactics that “stretch the bounds of constitutionally protected speech.” One abortion supporter attempted to assassinate Justice Brett Kavanaugh last week.
Clarke showed her opposition to crisis pregnancy centers following a Supreme Court ruling in June 2018 that struck down a California requirement that the centers inform patients about state abortion services.
“The anti-choice movement will stop at nothing,” wrote Clarke, using left-wing activist jargon to refer to pro-life groups. She added the hashtags, “#EndTheLies” and “#ExposeFakeClinics.”
Clarke also said the centers prey on women of color. She said the Supreme Court decision would have “harmful consequences for women, especially women of color who are often targeted by predatory [crisis pregnancy centers].”
The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a civil rights group Clarke led at the time, alleged that crisis pregnancy centers “target some of the most vulnerable women in communities today.”
Asked about Clarke’s tweets, Rubio said she should be disqualified from overseeing any eventual investigation into the crisis pregnancy center attacks.
“Kristen Clarke never should have been confirmed,” Rubio told the Washington Free Beacon. “Her disdain toward the very people now under threat was predictable and it should be disqualifying. Attorney General Garland should make clear that Clarke will have no involvement in any of these cases as those move forward.”
The Justice Department did not respond to requests for comment about Clarke or whether the agency is considering investigations into the attacks.
Clarke has a long history of making controversial statements about issues she now oversees as civil rights chief. She wrote in support of the movement to defund the police in 2020 but denied to Republicans during her confirmation hearing that she wanted to defund police departments. In 2019, Clarke criticized the Chicago police department for requesting access to the cell phone of Jussie Smollett, the actor found to have staged a hoax in which he falsely claimed Trump supporters attacked him because he is black and gay. Clarke has criticized conservative Supreme Court judges, many of whom are now the target of left-wing radical protesters. She claimed that Kavanaugh’s presence on the bench would be “dangerous.” She called him a “man who harbors such bias, rage, fury and is so easily unhinged.”
Members of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol say they have enough evidence to indict former President Donald Trump.
“I would like to see the Justice Department investigate any credible allegation of criminal activity on the part of Donald Trump,” said committee member Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.).
“The evidence is very powerful that Donald Trump … began telling this big lie even before the elections, that he was saying that any ballots counted after Election Day were going to be inherently suspect,” Schiff told moderator Martha Raddatz on ABC’s “This Week.”
Since its first public hearing last week, the committee has argued that Trump fueled the anger that day that resulted in violence, threats to lawmakers, the injury of dozens of police officers and the death of Ashli Babbitt.
Schiff also said that there is enough evidence that links Trump with white nationalist groups before the riot, adding that the connection will be a clear focus of their investigation.
“Let me ask you, is there an actual conversation between people in Trump’s orbit and Proud Boys, Oathkeepers?” Raddatz asked Schiff.
“Well, you know, as I think the committee already disclosed and has been publicly reported, of course, there are connections between these white nationalist groups and some in Trump’s orbit,” Schiff exclaimed, although he added that he wouldn’t get into specifics until the hearings got to that point.
Committee members were tight-lipped on other Sunday news shows about what viewers can expect at this week’s hearings. However, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) agreed with Schiff that there is “overwhelming” evidence Trump participated in a “criminal conspiracy.”
The announcements have prompted speculation that the Jan. 6 committee is paving the way for U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland to indict Trump on criminal conspiracy charges.
Others were decidedly more skeptical.
Anyone expecting Merrick Garland to indict Donald Trump for felony sedition or conspiracy might consider that he was unwilling to charge either Mark Meadows or Dan Scavino with misdemeanor contempt.June 4, 2022
The first hearing claimed that multiple congressmen asked for pardons following the Capitol riot, but only named one, Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.).
Members of the committee, including Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) said they believed the request for pardons showed Perry and others knew they had done something illegal.
Perry has vigorously denied ever asking Trump for a pardon.
Three days of hearings have been scheduled for the coming week, on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday.
Monday’s hearing is slated to begin at 10 a.m. ET. The committee is expected to focus on Trump’s misinformation campaign and the lack of evidence supporting allegations of election fraud.
Steve Bannon’s legal team has issued subpoenas to top Democrats and members of the controversial Jan. 6 House of Representatives panel in a development in Bannon’s ongoing contempt of Congress case.
In October, the Democrat-led House voted to certify a contempt of Congress charge against Bannon, who had refused a subpoena from the Jan. 6 panel, asserting a right to executive privilege as a former White House staff member.
Despite legal questions over the validity of the panel’s subpoenas, the Department of Justice decided to pursue a criminal case against Bannon.
Now, Bannon’s lawyers have issued 16 subpoenas to top members of the committee, as well as other Democrats.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who chose the panel’s members; Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), the panel’s chairman; and the only two Republicans on the committee, Reps. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), were among those subpoenaed.
The subpoenas, which were obtained by The Epoch Times, demand that members turn over documents touching on an array of issues relevant to the case against Bannon.
In one section, Bannon’s lawyers ask for, “All documents … regarding the establishment of the January 6th Select Committee (‘Select Committee’), its membership, its staffing, its budget, its authority and functioning, and the authority of the Select Committee to issue subpoenas.”
The circumstances surrounding the establishment of the January 6 commission, which was created in a mostly party-line vote, have been a rallying point for critics of the panel.
Despite a longstanding House tradition of allowing minority leaders to choose their party’s members on committees, Pelosi refused efforts by House GOP Leader McCarthy (R-Calif.) to name Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) ranking member of the committee. Instead, Pelosi appointed Kinzinger and Cheney to the commission in an unprecedented breach of House tradition. McCarthy withdrew his picks in protest.
The subpoenas also demand all documents “regarding President Donald J. Trump’s assertion of executive privilege in response to any request of the Select Committee.”
Since the establishment of the January 6 panel, many former Trump officials have refused to testify or hand over documents, asserting a right to executive privilege.
Legal scholars are divided on the validity of these claims. However, some GOP critics of the commission have in the past argued that because the issue is so uncertain, federal courts should be consulted before moving ahead.
The subpoenas also request all documents “that reference making an example of Mr. Bannon, punishing him, hoping to influence or affect the conduct of other potential witnesses before the Select Committee, or words or similar meaning and effect.”
Many critics have accused the Jan. 6 commission of partisanship due to the Democrat-dominated commission almost exclusively targeting Republicans.
By the same token, another request in the subpoenas suggests that Bannon’s legal team suspects bias toward Bannon by some members of the panel.
Specifically, it requests “All documents … which tend to show the bias of any Select Committee member or staff (including animosity toward Mr. Bannon, or animosity toward a group with which Mr. Bannon is affiliated).”
The documents were delivered to targeted members electronically “to avoid the spectacle of approaching individual Representatives and staff members to personally serve them,” said David Schoen, an attorney for Bannon, in a letter affixed to the subpoenas.
It is not clear whether the subpoenas have yet been accepted. A lawyer for the House did not respond to a request for comment.
Bannon was for a long time the only person to face criminal charges for refusing a January 6 commission subpoena.
The commission has not restricted itself to only former Trump officials, going so far as to target sitting members of Congress like Reps. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), Scott Perry (R-Pa.), and even House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).
McCarthy called the efforts to subpoena sitting members of Congress an “abuse of power,” and all three House Republicans refused to testify before the committee.
The panel also set its sights recently on Ginni Thomas, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ wife, over claims that she texted Meadows during the Jan. 6 rally.
In view of the partisan nature of the summons and charges advanced by the commission some Republicans, including Trump, have accused it of a “witch hunt” exclusively targeting Democrats’ GOP enemies.
Others, like McCarthy, have been more ambiguous in their critiques of the committee. When the commission sent out its subpoena to Bannon, McCarthy argued that the ongoing legal disputes made the subpoena’s legitimacy unknown.
“They’re issuing an invalid subpoena,” McCarthy said. “Issuing an invalid subpoena weakens our power. He has the right to go to the court to see if he has executive privilege or not. I don’t know if he does or not, but neither does the committee. So they’re weakening the power of Congress itself by issuing an invalid subpoena.”
Following the commission’s recent decision to subpoena several prominent Republicans—marking the first time in U.S. history that sitting members of Congress have been subpoenaed by a congressional body—McCarthy further expanded on his argument that the subpoenas are potentially invalid.
“All valid and lawfully issued subpoenas must be respected and honored,” wrote Elliot S. Berke, McCarthy’s attorney, in a lengthy May 27 letter (pdf). “Unfortunately, the words and actions of the Select Committee and its members have made it clear that it is not exercising a valid or lawful use of Congress’ subpoena power.
“In fact,” Berke continued, citing Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) refusal to place minority-selected members on the commission, “the Select Committee is not even operating in compliance with the rules its own members voted to put in place.”
If convicted of contempt of Congress, Bannon faces a minimum sentence of one month in jail or a maximum sentence of 12 months in jail, in addition to a fine ranging from $100 to $100,000.
A former U.S. congressman has pleaded guilty to several election fraud charges, including bribery and falsification of voting records.
Former Rep. Michael Myers (D-Pa.), 79, admitted to bribing an election judge in Philadelphia, Domenick Demuro, to illegally add votes for certain candidates, including candidates for federal and state offices.
Myers and Demuro, both Democrats, supported fellow Democrat candidates. Myers would receive payments from the candidates, by cash or check, and send a portion of the funds to Demuro.
The judge of elections for the 39th Ward, 36th Division in South Philadelphia would then add fraudulent votes for Myers’s clients.
“At Myers’s direction, Demuro would add these fraudulent votes to the totals during Election Day, and then would later falsely certify that the voting machine results were accurate,” the Department of Justice said in a statement.
The fraud took place during elections starting in 2014 and going through 2018, authorities said.
Myers also admitted to conspiring to commit fraud with Marie Beren, a judge of elections for the 39th Ward, 2nd Division in Philadelphia. Myers acknowledged directing Beren to add votes to candidates he supported, including candidates for judicial office who had hired Myers.
Demuro pleaded guilty in 2020 to conspiring to deprive people of civil rights and using interstate facilities in aid of bribery. Demuro was supposed to be sentenced on June 30, 2020, but sentencing has repeatedly been postponed. It is currently scheduled to take place on June 14.
Beren, another Democrat, pleaded guilty in 2021. The charges to which she pleaded guilty weren’t clear because the details are sealed. Beren was set to be sentenced on Feb. 15 but the hearing was postponed until Aug. 16.
“Voting is the cornerstone of our democracy. If even one vote has been illegally cast or if the integrity of just one election official is compromised, it diminishes faith in process,” U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania Jennifer Williams, a Biden appointee, said in a statement. “Votes are not things to be purchased and democracy is not for sale. If you are a political consultant, election official, or work with the polling places in any way, I urge you to do your job honestly and faithfully. That is what the public deserves and what the federal government will enforce.”
“One thing you can say about Ozzie Myers: his values have long been out of whack,” added Jacqueline Maguire, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Philadelphia Division. “Decades ago, he valued a fake sheikh’s bribes more than the ethical obligations of his elected federal office. This time around, he valued his clients’ money and his own whims more than the integrity of multiple elections and the will of Philadelphia voters. Free and fair elections are critical to the health of our democracy, which is why protecting the legitimacy of the electoral process at every level is such a priority for the FBI.”
Myers entered Congress in late 1976, but was expelled in 1980 after he was taped taking a bribe from undercover FBI agents. He was convicted on charges of bribery and conspiracy and spent several years in prison.
Myers is scheduled to be sentenced on Sept. 27. He faces up to 60 years in prison, up to three years of supervised release, and a fine of up to $1.25 million.
Abortion activists firebombed a pro-life pregnancy center outside Buffalo, N.Y., the latest in a series of attacks on pro-life offices and churches since the leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade.
The pro-life organization CompassCare reported that early Tuesday morning, activists smashed windows and set fires in the group’s Amherst, N.Y., medical office. The assailants graffitied the phrase “Jane Was Here” on the building, a tagline associated with a group called Jane’s Revenge that has claimed responsibility for attacks on pro-life institutions across the country.
The attack comes as Supreme Court justices and pro-life advocates face heightened threats this month of leftwing violence over the Court’s looming Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health decision. Jane’s Revenge took credit for the firebombing of a pro-life office in Wisconsin last month. And anarchists who vandalized four churches in Washington State claimed association with Jane’s Revenge. The Department of Homeland Security has warned law enforcement about potential violence against justices, clerks, and even clergy members in the wake of the Dobbs ruling. Pro-abortion violence is not the only kind tacitly supported by the left. The Washington Free Beaconreported on Tuesday how two Ivy League lawyers who lobbed a Molotov cocktail into a police car during the summer 2020 riots worked out a sweetheart plea deal last month with Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Justice Department.
CompassCare CEO Jim Harden condemned the attack and called for Democratic New York officials to protect pro-life organizations.
“Because of this act of violence, the needs of women facing unplanned pregnancy will go unmet and babies will die,” Harden said.
The Supreme Court is expected to overturn Roe‘s recognition of a right to abortion in the Dobbs case, returning the issue of abortion access to the states.
While former Hillary Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann was acquitted of lying to the FBI, a number of new details came to light during his trial. Some haven’t been made known or been widely reported.
1. FBI Lawyer Sussmann Met With Sought Perkins Coie Job
Sussmann passed along claims about Clinton presidential rival Donald Trump to FBI lawyer James Baker on Sept. 19, 2016, as well as data that supposedly supported the claims.
Baker gave the information to others in the bureau, triggering an investigation. The FBI and CIA both determined the claims were unsupported.
Baker, while testifying during the trial, described Sussmann as a friend whom he met when both worked for the Department of Justice (DOJ), the FBI’s parent agency. Baker, who left the bureau in May 2018, revealed that he was seeking to work for Perkins Coie, the firm that employed Sussmann, soon after.
“To the best of my recollection, I think it was Michael’s idea,” Baker said. “I mean, Michael knew that I had left the bureau, and I was looking around for a job—I had a job at the time, so I was working—I was working at the time, but I was looking around at other jobs, including [at] law firms. And so somehow he became aware of that and inquired about whether I would be interested in working at Perkins Coie.”
In one of many text messages the men exchanged before and after the meeting, Sussmann told Baker on Sept. 29, 2018, that it was “great seeing you this week.” That was a reference to a meeting that involved discussing a job at Perkins Coie, according to Baker.
While Sussmann arranged interviews for Baker, Perkins Coie never made a job offer.
Baker described “a miscommunication” in which a headhunter he was working with told him that the firm had essentially rejected him. But when Baker conveyed the message to Sussmann, Sussmann “went and got it sorted out,” Baker said, adding that the firm was actually considering offering him a job. Baker, however, ended up taking jobs at the think tank R Street Institute and CNN. He left those positions to work at Twitter, where he’s currently employed.
2. Joffe Was an FBI Source, and Was Fired
The information that Sussmann took to the FBI was obtained by Rodney Joffe, among others. Joffe was a technology executive at Neustar who was one of Sussmann’s clients.
Joffe was a confidential human source (CHS) for the bureau for years, it was revealed during the trial. He had regularly helped the bureau on cybersecurity matters and was even recommended for an FBI award in 2013.
But Joffe was terminated, apparently because of his actions in 2016. He was “closed for cause as a source,” prosecutor Deborah Brittain Shaw said.
“Our understanding is that Mr. Joffe was terminated as a source for cause in 2021 as an outgrowth of this investigation,” Michael Bosworth, a defense lawyer, added later.
The defense successfully got U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper, an Obama appointee, to order prosecutors not to reference Joffe’s status again, after they claimed it was “prejudicial to explore or elicit further testimony about his termination, given that it happened so late and was connected to this case.”
Bosworth called Joffe “one of the world’s leading cyber experts” during opening arguments.
Joffe “exploited his access” to non-public data from Trump Tower, Trump’s apartment in New York, and the White House to compile the data Sussmann eventually took to the FBI, according to prosecutors. Joffe could still be charged with crimes, prosecutors have indicated. He wasn’t called as a witness because he was going to refuse to answer questions, since he’s still under investigation.
3. ‘Tea Leaves’ Was April Lorenzen
The group that gathered the data that Sussmann presented to the FBI also included April Lorenzen, a data analyst at a firm called ZETAlytics.
It was known that a person in the group went online and posted some of the information under the moniker “Tea Leaves.” The posts were made in October 2016, shortly after Sussmann met with Baker.
But the identity of the person wasn’t confirmed until the trial, during which Bosworth said it was Lorenzen.
Bosworth was questioning FBI agent Ryan Gaynor, who monitored the investigation into the Trump–Russia claims from Washington on behalf of FBI leadership.
Gaynor acknowledged that, as far as he knew, nobody had tried to contact the person who posted the information online pseudonymously.
“And are you aware that, if they had done so, they would have discovered that the person posting was another cyber expert named April Lorenzen?” Bosworth asked.
“I am not,” Gaynor said.
Slate magazine, which was one of the first outlets to publish an article about the Trump–Alfa Bank claims, described “Tea Leaves” as a male, as did The Intercept.
“Tea Leaves” was mentioned in Sussmann’s indictment, which also described the person “Originator-1.” According to the indictment, “Tea Leaves” was a business associate of “Tech Executive-1,” who has long been known as Joffe.
Jared Novick, who conducted research for Joffe on Trump associates such as Carter Page, said on the stand that Joffe “had involvement in” a number of companies, including ZETAlytics. Joffe previously refused to answer questions about the businesses he owned or was otherwise affiliated with during a deposition for a lawsuit filed by Alfa Bank.
Rodney Joffe, left, launching Littoral Ventures with others, including April Lorenzen, second from right, the CEO of ZETAlytics. (DOJ via The Epoch Times)
4. Multi-Pronged Effort to Seed Allegations
Lorenzen posted the data on a WordPress blog. One or more members of the group also reportedly took to Reddit to share the data, and Joffe directed Sussmann to go to the FBI with the claims, Sussmann indicated in previous testimony before Congress.
Separately, Joffe approached an FBI agent named Tom Grasso with several IP addresses that were purportedly linked to Alfa Bank, the Russian bank that Joffe’s group claimed had a secret backchannel with Trump’s business.
Grasso said on the stand that he’d been working with Joffe for years, even though he wasn’t Joffe’s handler. He also said the situation was “unusual” because “it concerned a matter that I normally did not work on with Mr. Joffe.”
“Most of the stuff I worked on Mr. Joffe with was cyber crime matters, and this was in the area of Russia and foreign influence and counterintelligence and things like that, which is why I quickly passed it off to who I thought were the people working that matter,” Grasso testified.
Grasso didn’t reveal Joffe was a CHS in passing along the information to others in the bureau. Instead, he described Joffe as an “anonymous reporter.”
During closing arguments, prosecutor Andrew DeFilippis said: “This is Mr. Joffe trying to put these politically charged allegations into another part of the FBI in order to create the appearance of two different streams of information. And that makes sense with the broader plan that was at work here. They were trying to hide origins, hide the involvement of clients in order to get the FBI to investigate.”
Another aspect of the effort involved promoting the allegations to the media. Sussmann, operatives with Fusion GPS, and at least one Clinton campaign staffer shared the data with reporters to try to get stories written. That plan was approved by Clinton herself, campaign manager Robby Mook said on the stand. Among the reporters was Mark Hosenball of Reuters, who emails show was in contact with Fusion operatives. Hosenball went to the FBI to ask about the “Tea Leaves” post.
5. Clinton Lawyers Met Regularly With Fusion
Marc Elias, another lawyer with Perkins Coie, served as the Clinton campaign’s counsel after Clinton won the Democratic primary. He hired Fusion to perform opposition research and to help him with legal services. Fusion is the firm that compiled the infamous anti-Trump dossier with the help of former British spy Christopher Steele.
Elias was known to have met multiple times with Fusion co-founders Peter Fritsch and Glenn Simpson ahead of the election. But during the trial, documents entered by the prosecution show the trio convened regularly, and that Debbie Fine, a top lawyer with the campaign, was part of the meetings.
One document, titled “Daily Check in,” shows that meetings were scheduled every weekday for 30 minutes from June 6 until Oct. 31, 2016. Another shows a meeting of the quartet on Aug. 12 for its daily check-in. A third shows a meeting on Aug. 17.
Fine said on the stand that she communicated with Fusion operatives on average several times a week.
Fine didn’t recall daily check-ins. She said that as far as she knew, only she and Elias were aware of Fusion doing research, but she didn’t know why others weren’t aware.
“I operated on the assumption that, like most of the work that I did for clients, it’s on a need-to-know basis, so I just—I didn’t share it, and I wasn’t told not to share it. And I don’t know whether or not Marc Elias shared it with anyone,” she said.
Fine also said she didn’t recall discussions about Alfa Bank. Presented with an email she asked Elias to print in October 2016, she said the email was about the Trump–Alfa Bank allegations, as laid out in the Slate article.
Elias previously told a congressional panel that Fusion was “acting as my agents” and that he met with the operatives on a weekly basis.
Other documents entered during the trial showed that Elias met with Joffe in his office and spoke with him by phone, and that Elias sent an article related to Alfa Bank to top campaign officials, including campaign chair John Podesta, four days before Sussmann went to the FBI.
Comey was interested in the case, another agent wrote.
The decision to open an investigation was made by senior officials.
Joseph Pientka, an FBI official, wrote in a message that the Chicago team “must” open a case because Bill Priestap, another official, “says its [sic] not an option—we must do it.”
The case was opened later that day.
FBI leadership kept tabs on the probe, mainly through Gaynor, who volunteered to monitor it from Washington.
Senior FBI leaders imposed a “close hold” on the material, “which meant that the specific information about who had provided the allegation could not be provided to the field,” Gaynor testified during the trial. Leaders were also said to be behind efforts to stonewall agents who asked to interview the source.
“When we said that we were interested in interviewing the—when I say ‘the source,’ I mean the author of the white paper or the source of the data—I don’t know if that’s different people or not—but wherever it came from,” said Allison Sands, the FBI agent who was in charge of investigating the claims.
But leadership communicated that “we should, at the division level, focus on the technical analysis,” she added.
Headquarters “was not giving us the ability to go interview these people,” Curtis Heide, another agent working the case, recounted. He said he was frustrated.
Agents said that it’s important to know about sources’ political biases, such as Sussmann representing the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign.
Gaynor acknowledged he had been under investigation for violating the hold during an interview with employees of the DOJ inspector general’s office during a 2020 meeting. He said he was “woefully ill prepared” for the meeting. He believes he’s no longer under investigation.
Former FBI Director James Comey speaks via a TV monitor during a hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on Sept. 30, 2020. (Stefani Reynolds/Pool/Getty Images)
7. Multiple Offices Worked on Investigation
Baker was based in Washington at the FBI’s headquarters. Gaynor monitored the investigation into the claims from Washington. Cyber experts in Chantilly, Virginia, initially analyzed the data, then passed the probe to a hybrid cyber-counterintelligence team in Chicago.
At least one agent based in Miami worked on the case, interviewing Central Dynamics, the company to which the Trump email domain was registered, while another agent or agents in Philadelphia handled interviews at Listrak, another company.
Grasso was based in Pittsburgh.
“It looks like the clearing house in London” received the same white paper as the one given to Baker, or a similar one, Sands wrote in a message on Oct. 4, 2016.
8. FBI Took Months to Close Investigation
A full investigation into the Trump–Russia claims was opened on Sept. 23, 2016. The probe wasn’t officially closed until Jan. 18, 2017.
FBI experts deemed the allegations likely false within a day. The team that did additional work in looking into the claims, which included contacting entities like Central Dynamics had come to a similar conclusion by Oct. 5, 2016.
The delay in closing the probe stemmed from not being able to figure out who handed over the thumb drives that contained the data, according to Sands.
The drives were serialized as 1b, which is digital evidence. When the bureau closes cases, it has to return items taken in the course of an investigation to their rightful owner.
“Well, in this case, we didn’t know who the owner of the thumb drives was, because James Baker wasn’t the owner,” Sands said. “He was like a middleman or something. He had given them to us, but we didn’t know who the thumb drives belonged to.”
The team moved to initiate an “abandonment hearing,” which would enable them to destroy the drives. However, because that involved layers of bureaucracy, Sands’s supervisor recommended reserializing the drives as 1a, which refers to anything an agent wants to have in a case file but isn’t necessarily evidence. She cited notes taken in an interview as an example.
The reclassification allowed the FBI to close the investigation. That means it was closed when CNN reported, citing anonymous sources, in March 2017 that it was still being investigated.
9. Paperwork Had ‘Mistakes’
The document memorializing the opening of the investigation said the DOJ referred the allegations to the FBI. So did the closing document.
Heide referred to both as “mistakes,” or “typos.” He said the team had apparently conflated the FBI’s office of general counsel with the DOJ.
That wasn’t the only problem with files related to the probe.
The closing document said that the was a “preliminary” inquiry as opposed to a “full” investigation.
“That’s a typo as well,” Heide said.
Heide said he was alerted to the issues for the first time in 2018 by the DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General.
“I believe they brought it to my attention and asked me if it was accurate, and my response was the same, that I don’t believe it was accurate,” he said.
10. Investigation Into Crossfire Hurricane Continues
Special counsel John Durham’s team, which prosecuted Sussmann, is investigating the origins of the government’s counterintelligence probes into alleged Trump and Russia links. Many of the probes utilized information paid for by the Clinton campaign.
The FBI is also conducting its own inquiry into the probes, collectively known as Crossfire Hurricane, Heide said on the stand.
“And are you being investigated individually as part of that investigation?” a prosecutor asked.
“Yes. Myself and, I believe, others as well,” Heide said.
Heide is being investigated for “not identifying exculpatory information as it pertained to one of the Crossfire Hurricane investigations,” he added later. “There were various consensual recordings that were obtained from one of the subjects, and there were statements, I believe, used in a FISA application that were—the exculpatory information was not divulged to the FISA court”—the secretive court authorized by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
A previous watchdog probe found the FBI committed “significant” errors and omissions in all four of the applications made to the court to spy on Page. The most significant may have been how an FBI lawyer, Kevin Clinesmith, doctored an email to state that Page wasn’t a CIA asset when, in fact, he was. Clinesmith pleaded guilty to a charge stemming from Durham’s probe and received probation.
Heide, during testimony, denied that he withheld exculpatory information from the court.
Heide, who is still with the FBI operating out of Des Moines, Iowa, worked on both Crossfire Hurricane and the Mid-Year Exam, or the bureau’s investigation into Clinton’s use while secretary of state of a private email server to send classified emails.
A mouthpiece for the Chinese Communist Party paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to advertise in USA Today, which claims it “represents the voice of an entire nation.”
China Daily has since October 2021 spent $287,500 advertising in USA Today, according to filings with the Department of Justice. The iconic American newspaper is the latest news outlet to partner with the Beijing-controlled newspaper, which in recent years has paid outlets like Time, the Los Angeles Times, and Foreign Policy magazine millions of dollars to publish articles as part of Beijing’s aggressive propaganda campaign in the West.
The USA Today–China Daily partnership comes amid heightened scrutiny over the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to shape Americans’ views of Chinese culture and its domestic and foreign policy. Newspapers like the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and the Washington Postended advertising deals with China Daily because of foreign influence. Human-rights groups have criticized American news companies for publishing China Daily articles that tout the Chinese Communist Party’s policies in Tibet, Hong Kong, and other disputed regions.
The U.S. government has also cracked down on China Daily and other Chinese state-controlled news agencies. The Justice Department in 2020 required China Daily to disclose details of its payments to American companies, showing more than $19 million spent on advertising and printing costs since November 2016.
The influx of advertising revenue is a much-needed boost for USA Today, which last year saw the steepest readership decline of any major newspaper—a 62 percent dropoff in circulation from 2020 to 2021. Time and the Los Angeles Times, two other companies working with China Daily, have also seen declines in subscriptions and advertising revenue. China Daily between November 2021 and April 2022 spent $1,618,143 on advertising. The newspaper paid $649,603 to Time, $315,540 to Financial Times, $306,000 to the Los Angeles Times, and $117,000 to Foreign Policy, according to its filings with the Justice Department.
USA Today did not respond to questions about where it has published China Daily content, but American news companies have typically republished China Daily articles online or in physical copies of their publications. Time, for example, publishes China Daily articles at a “paid content” section of its website, as well as in a printed insert in its magazine called “ChinaWatch.” Timehas not always disclosed that the Chinese government paid for the printed inserts, which are designed to look like other news articles in the magazine.
USA Today also did not respond to questions about potential conflicts of interest in its China Daily arrangement. But the newspaper insists its advertisers do not influence its news coverage.
“We will not blur the line between advertising and editorial content. We will provide appropriate disclosures, exercise transparency, and avoid actual or implicit commercial endorsements by our journalists,” reads USA Today‘s code of ethical conduct.
“When sponsorships of news are appropriate, we will not allow them to determine, change, or restrict content.”
Biden DOJ asks judge to go easy on Ivy League firebombers
On the cusp of nonstop, around-the-clock (primetime!) coverage of the Jan. 6 committee hearings, a couple of domestic terrorists are actually getting their day in court, and it is informative to see how Merrick Garland’s Justice Department is handling their prosecution.
Recall Garland’s breathless declaration, during his confirmation hearings, that “150 years after the Department’s founding, battling extremist attacks on our democratic institutions also remains central to its mission.”
Colinford Mattis and Urooj Rahman were arrested in the “mostly peaceful” protests following George Floyd’s murder. The two lawyers handed out Molotov cocktails to the crowd, and Rahman tossed one into a police car before fleeing the scene in Mattis’s van. They reached a plea deal with federal prosecutors in October 2020 that wiped out six of the seven charges against them. Those prosecutors, nonetheless, sought a maximum 10-year sentence and argued that the incident qualified for a so-called terrorism enhancement that would turbocharge sentencing—a determination with which the U.S. Probation Office concurred.
Ginning herself up to distribute explosives to the crowd, Rahman gave a video interview in which she declared, “This shit won’t ever stop until we fuckin’ take it all down,” adding that “the only way [the police] hear us is through violence.”
Then, Garland and the U.S. attorney for New York’s Eastern District, Breon Peace, who’s handling the prosecution, took office, and you won’t believe what happened next!
In mid-May, the same career DOJ prosecutors who argued for that 10-year sentence were back in court withdrawing their plea deal and entering a new one that allowed the defendants to cop to the lesser charge of conspiracy. It tosses out the terrorism enhancement entirely.
The new charge carries a five-year maximum sentence, but the prosecutors are urging the judge to go below that, asking for just 18 to 24 months on account of the “history and personal characteristics of the defendants” and the “aberrational nature of the defendants’ conduct.” Because, you know, Mattis graduated from Princeton and New York University Law School and was an attorney at the white-shoe law firm Pryor Cashman, and Rahman was a public-interest lawyer whose “best friend,” Obama administration intelligence official Salmah Rizvi, guaranteed the $250,000 required to release her on bail.
Law360, which reported on the events, calls the new deal an “unusual step.” James Trusty, a former prosecutor in the Department of Justice’s criminal division, broke it down for us this way: “Swapping in a softer plea agreement after having gone through the plea hearing is an exceedingly rare event in federal court.” It can happen, he said, if there is “truly some new development or understanding about the defendants that merits a fresh look.”
In this case, the new development is the political persuasion of the folks running the Justice Department, and for them, Mattis and Rahman are the right kind of domestic terrorists—the ones whose cases and conduct will never be the subject of a congressional hearing or plastered from wall to wall on cable television.
Remember their names, and the special treatment they received at the hands of the Biden Justice Department, when the broadcasts begin on Thursday and when Garland next has the gall to feign concern about political violence directed at our democratic institutions.
Treasurers work to expose what they consider a misuse of state retirement funds
After failing to advance their agenda by passing laws in Congress, progressives have found that they can impose their will on Americans just as effectively through our financial system. And while some state officials have recently started to fight back, they are heavily outgunned.
The world’s largest asset managers, BlackRock, State Street, and Vanguard, have signed on to the global Net Zero Asset Management Initiative and together use the $20 trillion of other people’s money that they manage to pressure companies whose shares they own into pursuing environmental and social-justice causes. Progressive state pension fund managers in California, New York, Maryland, and even Texas are doing the same with the trillions in retirement funds that they manage.
The various elements of this ideology have come together under the umbrella of “environmental, social and governance” finance (ESG), and its advocates now include the world’s largest banks, asset managers, pension funds, rating agencies, proxy agents, as well as numerous international corporate clubs including Climate Action 100+, the Global Investors Statement to Governments on Climate Change, the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative, and the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero.
ESG also has the support of the Biden Administration’s Securities and Exchange Commission, which announced it will require all listed companies to provide extensive reporting on their greenhouse gas emissions. It has the support of the Department of Justice, which just declared it would focus on “environmental justice,” and the Department of Labor, which announced it will no longer enforce a Trump-era regulation that barred private pension managers from including political causes such as ESG in their investment decisions.
The collective goal of these groups is to leverage their financial power to enforce the behavior that they want to see, targeting in particular fossil fuel producers and the gun industry. “Behaviors are going to have to change,” BlackRock CEO Larry Fink stated in a panel discussion last March. “You have to force behaviors and, at BlackRock, we are forcing behaviors.”
BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager, with $10 trillion in assets under its management. In his 2022 letter to CEOs, Fink wrote that “every company and every industry will be transformed by the transition to a net zero world.” Bloomberg News reported that ESG financial assets are growing exponentially and will reach $50 trillion by 2025, representing more than one-third of the $140 trillion in assets under management worldwide.
But some state officials see the ESG movement as a misuse of money that was entrusted to asset managers by pensioners. A study by the Boston College Center for Retirement Research reported that ESG investing reduced the returns to pensioners by 0.70 to 0.90 percent per year, largely because ESG investment funds, which are actively managed, charge higher fees than non-managed index funds. This means higher profits for asset managers, less money for retirees.
BlackRock Chair and CEO Laurence D. Fink attends a session at the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, on Jan. 23, 2020. (Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images)
And for all the added costs, many question whether ESG investing is doing much for the causes it claims to support. A research report by Columbia University and the London School of Economics stated that companies in ESG funds have “worse track records for compliance with labor and environmental laws, relative to portfolio firms held by non-ESG funds.”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk recently called ESG “an outrageous scam,” adding that “it has been weaponized by phony social justice warriors.”
“If BlackRock has their own money and they want to be activist investors, I think people have the right to deploy their own capital as they see fit,” said Scott Fitzpatrick, Missouri State Treasurer. “The problem here is that it’s other people’s money they’re using, and people don’t want their retirement money used for political purposes.”
Increasingly, state officials are discovering how state pension money is being used to support “the religion of global climate change,” said Derek Kreifels, CEO of the State Financial Officers Foundation. “Now we’re seeing the veil drop on how they’re weaponizing it. Now they’re starting to include all these other [social] issues as well.”
Activist asset managers vote the shares they manage to influence corporate executives, and this explains to a great extent why Disney, a producer of family entertainment, now advocates for sex education in elementary schools; why Delta, Coca Cola, and Major League Baseball fought against Georgia’s voter I.D. law; and why Citibank has fought against laws restricting abortion in conservative states and has curtailed lending to gun makers and retailers—all of which are political causes that have nothing to do with running their businesses. The Wall Street Journal reports that activist asset managers are now putting pressure on Walmart, Lowe’s, and TJ Maxx to take a stand against abortion restrictions.
But for all the headline-grabbing statements from CEOs on political and social issues, progressive asset managers have been content to operate quietly behind the scenes in boardrooms, shareholder meetings, and global conferences.
“If they were ever to admit what they’re really doing, they would be creating untold liability for themselves,” Fitzpatrick said. “It’s inviting lawsuits galore for people who can say, ‘you have violated your financial duty to us.’”
“As an asset manager, the only thing you have is trust,” said Utah State Treasurer Marlo Oaks. “If you violate that trust, your business is gone. The investment managers that are pushing this agenda are ultimately risking the very franchise that they’re using to drive it.”
By colluding against fossil fuel companies, Oaks said, banks and asset managers “are actively implementing economic sanctions. We need more capital going into oil and gas production and there are great opportunities there to make money. Why isn’t the money going there? Why aren’t capital markets working, like they have in the past? It’s because of ESG.”
One by one, conservative states are starting to push back through legislation and legal actions. Kreifels said that 23 states have taken some form of action, 13 of which have introduced formal legislation, to prevent state money from being used to support political causes. This, The New York Times wrote, has had a “chilling” effect on progressive initiatives, though how much of an effect remains to be seen.
In May, Oklahoma passed the Energy Discrimination Elimination Act, modeled on laws that were passed in Texas last year, which bars the state from conducting business with banks or asset managers that discriminate against fossil fuel companies. A similar bill in Oklahoma does the same for those that discriminate against gun manufacturers.
Last week, Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron issued a legal opinion, stating that the use of state pension money for “environmental, social and governance” was a conflict of interest and was “inconsistent with Kentucky law governing fiduciary duties.” Cameron criticized the “increasing trend among some investment management firms to use money in public and state employee pension plans – that is, other people’s money—to push their own political agendas and force social change.”
In December, Florida revoked proxy authority for asset managers, meaning they no longer have discretion to vote the shares that they manage for Florida pensioners. Gov. Ron DeSantis stated that this “will clarify the state’s expectations that all fund managers should act solely in the financial interest of the state’s funds.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is seen in Miami, Fla., on July 13, 2021. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
In November, Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich launched a formal investigation into progressive financial institutions’ “anticompetitive conduct,” accusing them of “threatening and intimidating companies if they do not comply with their left-wing agenda.”
Also in November, Louisiana barred JPMorgan from underwriting its municipal bonds because of its policies against gun manufacturers. West Virginia and Texas recently passed legislation blocking finance companies that discriminate against fossil fuel producers from municipal contracts.
“Next week, we’ll be sending out letters to financial institutions that are going to be put on a list that is going to bar them from contracts in the state of West Virginia,” said Riley Moore, West Virginia’s State Treasurer. “We’re an energy state and this is an existential threat to our economy.”
“We need energy independence in this country,” Moore said. Countries in Europe are now realizing that their green energy policies have caused unaffordable price spikes for fuel, led to a risk of blackouts when the wind doesn’t blow, created a dangerous dependence on countries like Russia, and in many cases actually increased the carbon footprint. “It’s because they rushed into this ESG nonsense,” he said “You can call it sustainable, but it can’t sustain a grid.”
In addition to what many see as a misallocation of state pension money, there are the bigger legal and societal issues around using the financial system to “force behaviors.”
“This seems to me to be using Wall Street to accomplish what the left was unable to accomplish through democratic means,” said Nebraska State Treasurer John Murante. If progressive policies had public support, they could enact laws democratically through Congress, he said. Instead, “they’re going around the democratic process and attempting to do indirectly what they were incapable of doing through persuasion and logic and reason.”
ESG investing would lose in the court of public opinion “because it’s incredibly unpopular. ESG is the 2023 version of CRT,” Murante said, referring to Critical Race Theory in schools. “It has been integrated into institutions without people knowing about it, but when they become aware of it, there is genuine national outrage.”
Going up against the world’s largest financial institutions and the Biden administration is a formidable task for state finance officials, however, and they have a long and difficult road ahead. But Murante says he’s feeling optimistic.
“We have three profound advantages on our side,” he said. “First, we’re right on the issues; second, we’re right on the law; and third, we have the people with us.”
“It’s a David and Goliath situation,” Kreifels said. “But David won.”
A former top adviser to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol breach admitted Sunday there was no “smoking gun” that suggested President Donald Trump planned the breach.
Denver Riggleman, a former Republican House representative, had recently been a senior adviser to the panel. He told CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday that there was no direct evidence that suggested the breach and protests outside the Capitol were premeditated.
CNN’s Jake Tapper asked the former lawmaker whether there is a “smoking gun” that “proves that Donald Trump or somebody around him knew that what happened January 6 was not a spontaneous outcry by his supporters, but was a planned attempt to get them to stop counting the electoral votes?”
“That probably [was] going to be very difficult to even find based on the limited authorities of Congress as far as getting data and things like that,” Riggleman ultimately conceded to CNN. However, he claimed later in the interview that the panel will reveal alleged nefarious actions carried out by Trump, although he didn’t make any specific claims.
There are “multiple groups involved,” he alleged. “And I think that’s what’s exciting about the hearings, is, they’re going to be able to put the multiple groups together. Remember, there’s different investigative teams that were looking at different parts of this the whole time.”
Riggleman on Sunday also appeared to declare his support for Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wy.), one of the leaders on the House Jan. 6 panel and who has become more and more unpopular among members of her own party amid her outspoken opposition to Trump. Riggleman also told CNN Sunday he is no longer a member of the Republican Party.
Peter Navarro, former trade adviser to President Donald Trump, speaks to reporters as he departs U.S. District Court after he was indicted on two counts of contempt of Congress for his failure to comply with a subpoena from the House of Representatives committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, in Washington on June 3, 2022. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
Late last week, former Trump adviser Peter Navarro was charged with contempt of Congress after he refused to cooperate with the panel. Months before that, former Trump campaign chief and former White House adviser Steve Bannon was charged by the Department of Justice with contempt of Congress charges.
While speaking to reporters on Friday, Navarro said that the FBI placed him in “leg irons” and said he was put in a jail cell that held would-be Ronald Reagan assassin John Hinckley Jr.
“Who are these people? This is not America,” Navarro said outside a federal court in Washington, D.C. “I was a distinguished public servant for four years.”
“They put me in leg irons, they stuck me in a cell, by the way—just a historical note—I was in John Hinckley’s cell,” Navarro said. “They seemed to think that that was like an important historical note. That’s punitive. What they did to me today violated the Constitution.”
He continued: “On Wednesday, I reached out to the Justice Department. I offered them a possible way forward. They responded with effectively the same kind of thing as you see in Stalin’s Russia or the Chinese Communist Party.”
The FBI has a workspace in the same law firm that employed the lawyer who took sketchy claims about Donald Trump and Russia to the bureau in 2016, the firm revealed in a new document.
The workspace, known as a “secure work environment,” within Perkins Coie’s office in Washington was cleared by the FBI on March 26, 2012, and has been “in continuous operation since then,” Michael Bopp, an attorney representing Perkins Coie, told members of Congress in a May 25 letter that was reviewed by The Epoch Times.
What’s more, Michael Sussmann, the lawyer who took the claims against Trump to the FBI’s nearby headquarters ahead of the 2016 election, had access to the workspace through July 2021, according to the missive.
The workspace was created in 2011 and includes a General Services Administration-approved security container and a key locker, both of which were paid for by Perkins Coie. It also features a secure telephone, a fax machine, and a security token card, each of which is owned by the bureau.
The workspace is maintained by Perkins Coie and periodically inspected by the FBI to ensure the space “is operating in accordance with the requisite standards,” according to the letter.
“The Democrat Party’s law firm … has this co-located workspace that they operate in concert with the FBI. Why in the world would that be the case?” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) said on Fox News, which first reported on the letter sent to Gaetz and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).
The FBI indicated that the workspace is lawful and that it’s meant to shield classified documents from the bulk of workers at Perkins Coie and other companies that have similar spaces.
“The FBI complies with the law and security policies and works with the Department of Justice to serve classified, Court-authorized legal process [sic] necessary to support national security investigations,” an FBI spokesperson told The Epoch Times in an email.
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) speaks during a hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington, on July 29, 2020. (Graeme Jennings/Pool via Reuters)Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) walks in a courtroom in Atlanta, Ga., on April 22, 2022. (John Bazemore/Pool/Getty Images)
“In certain instances, the FBI coordinates with non-government, third-party entities, such as law firms, that represent service providers which receive these classified Court orders. This includes providing access to private attorneys which represent the service providers in satisfaction of their legal rights. As part of this, the FBI ensures that any storage of classified orders meets stringent security protocols required for such documents.”
Gaetz said he consulted with former federal prosecutors, who informed him they had never heard of a similar relationship.
“Our concern is that politically motivated dirt was being converted into politically motivated investigations,” he said.
The lawmakers want the facility shut down.
Perkins Coie didn’t respond to requests for comment. The FBI didn’t answer when asked whether the bureau had considered closing the facility.
According to the letter, the facility is operating under a “modified arrangement.” That disclosure came in response to a question about whether the same arrangement remained in place after Sussmann resigned from the firm in September 2021.
Sussmann was charged that month with lying to the FBI. The lawyer handed over data and white papers claiming there was a secret link between Trump’s business and a Russian bank just weeks before the 2016 election. Sussmann was representing the campaign of Hillary Clinton, Trump’s rival, at the time. The FBI determined the data didn’t support the allegations, and the CIA later reached a similar conclusion. Sussmann told an FBI lawyer he was acting on his own accord, but later told Congress he was acting on behalf of a client. He was acquitted on May 31.
Sussmann was well-known throughout the FBI. He worked closely with the bureau in its investigation of the intrusion into Democrat entities’ networks and even had an FBI badge that gave him access to the bureau’s headquarters, which he used when meeting with the bureau lawyer.
FBI Director Christopher Wray, a Trump appointee, was pressed during a Senate hearing on May 25 about Sussmann by Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.), who questioned why Sussmann had the badge and why the FBI kept his identity secret from agents who investigated the allegations.
Wray said he couldn’t answer the questions because Sussmann’s trial wasn’t over.
“Because I’ve got agents working with [special counsel John] Durham on the case, and they’re in the middle of trial right now, I just don’t think I can get into a discussion of that here,” Wray said.
The richest person in the world has taken a swipe at the media over allegedly being disinterested in investigating the suspected clients of the alleged sex trafficking ring run by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.
In a series of tweets on June 4, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said it is “remarkable” how the U.S. Department of Justice has not published the list of clients of convicted sex offender Epstein and his co-conspirator Maxwell, a convicted sex trafficker. The pair were accused of procuring, trafficking, sexually abusing a vast network of female minors as young as 11.
What is more “remarkable,” Musksaid, is that “no one in the media cares” about the Epstein-Maxwell case.
Only thing more remarkable than DOJ not leaking the list is that no one in the media cares. Doesn’t that seem odd? pic.twitter.com/JEK4TErABB
Although Epstein and Maxwell were accused of operating a child sex trafficking ring, none of their clients have been charged. According to some abuse survivors, the ring’s clients include powerful politicians, businessmen, and other influential leaders, who, since Epstein’s scandal broke, have attempted to distance themselves from the financier.
Epstein, who in 2008 was convicted and sentenced for soliciting prostitution from a minor, was found dead in a New York federal jail in August 2019. At the time, he was awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges for abusing women and girls in Manhattan and Florida from 2002 to 2005.
The New York City Medical Examiner’s Office ruled that his death was suicide by hanging. However, a forensic pathologist who was hired by his brother, Mark Epstein, said Epstein’s autopsy was more indicative of homicide, not suicide.
A jury found Maxwell guilty of six sex-trafficking charges in December 2021.
“Sometimes I think my list of “list of enemies is too short, so…” Musk wrote in the thread of posts on Twitter.
Sometimes I think my list of enemies is too short, so …
A commenter to the threat posted a picture of Musk and Maxwell at a Vanity Fair party in 2014. In response to the picture, Musk took a further swipe at those who are pushing the theory that he is associated with Maxwell and Epstein.
“Ah yes, Maxwell photobombing me at a @VanityFair Oscars party – you should them why they invited her,” Musk wrote. “The same people who push this photo say nothing about prominent people who actually went to his island a dozen times. Also very strange …”
Ah yes, Maxwell photobombing me at a @VanityFair Oscars party – you should them why they invited her.
The same people who push this photo say nothing about prominent people who actually went to his island a dozen times. Also very strange …
The billionaire later highlighted a Vanity Fair article published in 2003, which reads, “Lately, Jeffrey Epstein’s high-flying style has been drawing oohs and aahs: the bachelor financier lives in New York’s largest private residence, claims to take only billionaires as clients, and flies celebrities including Bill Clinton and Kevin Spacey on his Boeing 727.”
Musk’s comments on the Epstein-Maxwell case came weeks after he questioned why Vanity Fair invited Maxwell to a party Musk attended in 2014. Back then, he also questioned why none of Epstein’s alleged clients have gone “down.”
“Where is their “client” list? Shouldn’t at least one of them go down!?” Musk commented.
Former Attorney General William Barr called the Russiagate “a dirty political trick” against former President Donald Trump and criticized the justice system as “rigged” to target Republicans.
“I thought we were heading into a constitutional crisis,” Barr told conservative talk radio host Glenn Beck in a recent episode, after being asked about his return to politics between 2019 and 2020. Barr then brought up the Russia probe against Donald Trump, the second president he served as the attorney general after George H.W. Bush.
“Whatever you think of Trump,” he explained, “the fact is that the whole Russiagate thing was a grave injustice. It appears to be a dirty political trick that was used first to hobble him and then potentially to drive him from office.”
He said he believes Hillary Clinton’s Russiagate scandal was “seditious,” referencing the scheme that began in early 2016 to vilify Trump as an agent of the Kremlin.
Such remarks, however, were soon followed by the acquittal of Michael Sussmann as a jury on May 31 found him not guilty of lying to the FBI. Prosecutors accused the former Clinton campaign cybersecurity lawyer of not disclosing who he worked for to a top FBI official ahead of the 2016 election.
His tip—an alleged link between then-presidential candidate Donald Trump and Russia—also failed to prove any Russian collusion.
The jury, from a largely Democrat-leaning pool of the nation’s capital, ultimately rejected the prosecution’s claims. Defense Attorney Sean Berkowitz accused Durham, who was appointed by Barr during the Trump Administration to probe the origins of the now disproven Russiagate, of picking evidence to fit a narrative.
“I do think there is a degree to which the system had a double standard, and still has a double standard, and is rigged against Republicans,” Barr said on the podcast. “For an example, while I was Attorney General, no case that was embarrassing to the Democrats was leaked. However, cases that hurt Republicans were leaked.”
The Epoch Times has reached out to the Department of Justice for comment.
Barr has praised special counsel Durham and his team for doing an “exceptionally able job” although failing in getting a conviction. “I think he accomplished something far more important,” he told Fox News, given that Durham had “crystallized the central role” that Clinton’s campaign played in “fanning the flames” of the narrative against Trump’s campaign.
He added that Durham had also “exposed really dreadful behavior” by the senior ranks in the FBI, who “knowingly use this information to start an investigation of Trump and then dupe their own agents by lying to them and refusing to tell them what the real source of that information was.”
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) gave an impassioned defense of the Second Amendment during the National Rifle Association’s annual convention in Texas, days after a man murdered 19 children at an elementary school.
Cruz’s remarks come after an 18-year-old Latino attacked Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday before being killed by an off-duty U.S. Border Patrol agent. The response by local enforcement officials has been the focus of most of the criticism following the tragedy as numerous mistakes were made.
“If children are the picture of innocence, then the lunatics and the monsters like this one, the one who would deliberately murder children, they are the picture of evil,” Cruz said. “The anguish of those families right now is unimaginable. The very worst pain on Earth. All of us in Texas need to come together and comfort those families right now. We need to love them, embrace them, and take care of them.”
Cruz said that it was important for officials to understand what was driving tragedies like the one in Uvalde because “when we were growing up, this kind of thing didn’t happen.”
“Kids may have worried about getting into a fist fight at school, maybe a bloody nose at recess, but we never worried about a psychopath coming into our classrooms to commit murder.” Cruz slammed “the elites who dominate our culture” for pushing the notion that “firearms lie at the root of the problem.”
“It’s far easier to slander one’s political adversaries and to demand that responsible citizens forfeit their constitutional rights than it is to examine the cultural sickness giving birth to unspeakable acts of evil,” Cruz said. “It’s far less comfortable to ask why despair and isolation and violent hatred is so prevalent in America. It requires a sick soul to drive a truck into a crowded sidewalk, to plan a bomb at a marathon, or to fly a plane into a building. It requires a sick soul to open fire in a movie theater or in a church or in a school. A speeding automobile in the hands of a madman is as deadly as is a jet airplane.”
“Tragedies like the events of this week are a mirror forcing us to ask hard questions, demanding that we see where our culture is failing, looking at broken families, absent fathers, declining church attendance, social media bullying, violent online content, desensitizing the act of murder in video games, chronic isolation, prescription drug, and opioid abuse and their collective effects on the psyche of young Americans is both complicated and multifaceted,” Cruz continued. “It’s a lot easier to moralize about guns and to shriek about those you disagree with politically, but it’s never been about guns.”
Cruz noted that for millions of Americans, the Second Amendment is not an abstract theory, they live in conditions that require them to protect themselves from evil. Cruz said that the Obama White House reported that firearms “are used defensively to stop a crime between 500,000 and one million times every single year.”
“Taking guns away from these responsible Americans will not make them safer, nor will it make our nation more secure,” Cruz said. “In an age where elites embrace defunding the police, when homelessness runs rampant, when gangs dominate entire communities, and when radical district attorneys refuse to prosecute violent crime in cities across America, rarely has the Second Amendment been more necessary to secure the rights of our fellow citizens.”
Cruz noted that there are plenty of major cities across the U.S. that have strict gun control laws and yet are still violent and among some of the most dangerous places in the U.S.
Cruz also cited a quote from John R. Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center, who wrote, “Out of the 101 countries where we have identified mass public shootings occurring, the United States ranked 66 in the per capita frequency of these attacks and 56th in the murder rate.”
Cruz noted that the Uvalde attacker passed a background check and that solutions offered by Democrats to address the problem would not have stopped the tragedy.
Cruz noted that Democrats filibustered legislation that he created in 2013 with Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) that “was designed to take the guns out of the hands of felons and fugitives and those with serious mental illness.”
“Grassley-Cruz did three things,” Cruz explained. “First, it would mandate that the Department of Justice conduct an audit of federal agencies to make sure that all felony convictions have been reported to the database. Second, Grassley-Cruz would create a gun crime task force at the Department of Justice, specifically to prosecute felons or fugitives who tried to buy firearms illegally. In 2010, there were 48,000 felons and fugitives who tried to illegally buy guns. The Obama Department of Justice prosecuted only 44 of them. That is indefensible. Third, Grassley-Cruz would’ve authorized $300 million for school safety improvement grants to harden our schools. When Grassley-Cruz came to the Senate floor for a vote in 2013, 52 senators voted yes, including nine Democrats. It was the most bipartisan piece of comprehensive legislation before the Senate.”
“So, why didn’t Grassley-Cruz pass into law if a majority of the Senate voted for it? Because Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer and the Democrats filibustered it,” Cruz concluded on the matter. “If you want to talk about policy proposals that could have stopped at least some of these mass murders, Grassley-Cruz is a perfect example.”
In closing his speech, Cruz said, “We must not react to evil and tragedy by abandoning the Constitution or infringing on the rights of our law-abiding citizens.”
“Now is not the time to yield to panic or intimidation or fear,” he said. “Now is not the time for lies. It is not the time for empty political gestures. Now is the time for unity. Now is the time for love. And now is the time for action to protect our rights, to stop those with evil in their hearts and to do everything humanly possible to protect our children and to protect our families.”
The Small Business Administration (SBA) had no plan to address fraud in its nearly trillion-dollar Paycheck Protection Program, according to the agency’s inspector general.
The SBA “did not have an organizational structure” to handle potential fraud for the PPP program, which allowed businesses to receive forgivable loans from the federal government if they kept their staff amid the pandemic, according to Inspector General Hannibal Ware. The report, published Thursday, details how the agency altered its loan review process over time but was still unable to establish defined roles on how to counter fraud.
“The agency did not establish a centralized entity to design, lead, and manage fraud risk,” the report states.
PPP was established in March 2020 as a part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act. Former president Donald Trump extended the program until May 2021. Borrowers submitted applications for PPP through the Small Business Administration, which then delegated approval and distribution to its certified lenders across the country. The loans totaled $799.8 billion to roughly 5,500 private lenders, according to the report. But experts say as much as $80 billion may be fraudulent loans.
“It is the biggest fraud in a generation,” Matthew Schneider, a former U.S. attorney, told NBC News.
The report comes amid historic inflation levels, which experts attribute at least in part to trillions in government spending amid the pandemic, including the PPP program. The Small Business Administration, however, omitted any mention of inflation from its proposed budget for 2023, the Washington Free Beaconreported earlier this month.
The exact amount of fraud is unknown, but the Department of Justice has prosecuted several PPP fraudsters, including a man who submitted false applications to steal $27 million. Labor unions also raked in at least $37 million in forgivable loans they were ineligible to receive, the Free Beacon reported.
Republicans on the House Committee on Small Business have in recent months sent a series of letters to SBA administrator Isabella Guzman demanding answers on how the agency is addressing PPP fraud. Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R., Mo.), the committee’s ranking member, said the inspector general’s report confirmed his fears about the agency’s incompetence.
“It is clear to me the SBA under President Biden has failed to protect these federal dollars thus hurting both the American taxpayer and our struggling small businesses across the country,” Luetkemeyer told the Free Beacon. “The SBA clearly cannot manage this critical task.”
Democratic consultants may have misled the Department of Justice about foreign lobbying work for a company that counted Hunter Biden on its board of directors, a pair of Republican senators claim.
Blue Star Strategies disclosed this month that its founders, Karen Tramontano and Sally Painter, had two meetings in 2016 with State Department officials regarding Ukraine’s Burisma Holdings. But according to Sens. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R., Wis.), Blue Star’s founders failed to disclose nine other meetings with government officials, including two American ambassadors to Ukraine.
“It appears that Blue Star Strategies’ top executives, Karen Tramontano and Sally Painter, filed incomplete and misleading information with the Department of Justice,” Grassley and Johnson wrote Attorney General Merrick Garland. The senators pointed to records from their investigation into Biden and Blue Star’s work for Burisma.
Hunter Biden, who served on the Burisma board of directors, recruited Painter and Tramontano in November 2015 to consult for Burisma and its owner Mykola Zlochevsky, who was under investigation for bribery. It is unclear what role Hunter Biden played in Blue Star’s foreign lobbying efforts. But the arrangement has come under scrutiny because Biden served in that role while his father was leading the Obama administration’s anticorruption efforts in Ukraine.
The senators’ findings raise questions about whether the Justice Department prematurely closed an investigation into Blue Star’s foreign lobbying. Painter and Tramontano, who served in the Clinton administration, disclosed their 2016 meetings in a filing earlier this month in order to resolve a Justice Department investigation into their foreign lobbying activity. A lawyer for the consultants said prosecutors closed the investigation after the firm disclosed the two meetings in a filing under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
The end of the probe was a much-needed win for Hunter Biden, who is under investigation for his taxes and foreign entanglements. Federal prosecutors are reportedly looking into Biden’s work in China and Ukraine. Burisma paid Biden and a business partner more than $80,000 a month to serve on the board of directors. At the time, Zlochevsky was under investigation for allegedly paying $23 million in bribes for drilling rights.
Painter and Tramontano disclosed to the Justice Department that they met with State Department officials Amos Hochstein and Catherine Novelli in 2016 to discuss Burisma. The consultants arranged meetings between the officials and Burisma’s lawyer in order to ascertain the U.S. government’s position toward the firm.
Grassley and Johnson detailed nine other meetings between Blue Star and officials from the Departments of State, Commerce, and Energy from 2015 to 2019.
The senators asked Garland whether the Department of Justice was aware of the meetings and whether the agency plans to address the incomplete filings.
“DOJ must scrutinize Blue Star Strategies’ recently filed [Foreign Agents Registration Act] forms given the firm’s apparent incomplete disclosures and its lack of consistency with our investigative records,” they told Garland.
Painter and Tramontano did other advocacy work for Burisma that is not disclosed to the Justice Department. In 2017, the consultants arranged a partnership between Burisma and the Atlantic Council, the prominent Beltway foreign policy think tank. For $300,000, Atlantic Council granted access to Burisma for its energy conferences and other policy events. State Department officials cautioned Atlantic Council officials about Burisma prior to the engagement, citing concerns about the Ukrainian company’s reputation.
Blue Star Strategies and a lawyer for the firm did not respond to a request for comment.
A probe of the National School Boards Association’s call for federal investigations of parents as domestic terrorists found the White House was involved in the drafting process that led to the controversial request.
The association commissioned an internal investigation following outcry from parent groups and association board members who were upset by the inflammatory rhetoric in a Sept. 29 letter to President Joe Biden. The group found that Chip Slaven, then-CEO of the National School Boards association, told a White House senior policy adviser on Sept. 21 that he planned to ask Biden to use the FBI and Justice Department to investigate threats against school board members under counterterrorism statutes and the Patriot Act.
The White House adviser, Mary C. Wall, solicited Slaven for examples of threats made against school board members in advance of a Sept. 22 meeting with the Justice Department and other White House offices. The association detailed these previously unreported exchanges in a report released Friday.
“Evidence indicates that White House officials discussed the existence of the Letter, its requests, and the contents of the Letter with Department of Justice officials more than a week before the Letter was finalized and sent to President Biden,” the report says.
The letter sparked controversy at the time after Attorney General Merrick Garland formed a federal task force to monitor threats against school boards and teachers. Parent groups and Republicans accused the Biden administration of colluding with the NSBA to use the letter to justify scrutiny of school board meetings. They’ve questioned the involvement of federal investigators in local school board issues and alleged that the federal task force is intended to intimidate parents who voiced concern over schools’ coronavirus policies and left-wing curricula. Members of the association also complained about the contents of the letter, as well as being left out of the loop before it was sent.
The Washington Free Beaconreported on Oct. 21 that the White House was in contact with the National School Boards Association before the group sent the letter. But it was not known then that the White House knew of the controversial rhetoric in the document.
“It is inexcusable that a senior White House adviser would have the audacity to collaborate on a public request to use the Patriot Act against families,” Nicole Neily, the president of Parents Defending Education, said in a statement about the association’s report. “This is, quite literally, a betrayal of trust by the highest levels of government.”
Sen. Ben Sasse (R., Neb.), who questioned Garland about the federal task force in a Senate hearing last year, said the association report showed the letter was a “political hack job … drummed up by progressive activists and their partners in the Biden White House to chill parents’ exercise of free speech.”
The association said in a statement that the letter did not represent its views and that it does not support federal intervention in school board meetings. The report places most of the blame for the letter on Slaven, who served as the group’s interim CEO until November.
According to emails included in the report, Slaven began toying with the idea of asking the White House for federal support at school board meetings on Sept. 8. He told other association executives about a complaint from an Ohio school board member who received a threatening letter from a parent. Slaven said the intense atmosphere at school board meetings reminded him of the aftermath of “Waco or Ruby Ridge.”
Slaven shared his concerns with Wall, the White House adviser, on Sept. 14. Wall asked Slaven to provide her with some of the “egregious examples” of threats made against school board members. She followed up on the request on Sept. 21, saying that she wanted to cite them in a meeting the next day with the Justice Department.
Slaven gave Wall several examples from across the country. He also shared a summary of a letter he planned to send to the White House. Slaven told Wall he planned to ask Biden to use the FBI and Justice Department to use its counterterrorism divisions to investigate threats against school board members. Slaven also made reference to the Patriot Act and “domestic terrorism” investigations.
Slaven sent Wall a final copy of the letter hours before publishing it on Sept. 29. The White House official raised no objections to the language in the letter, and instead offered Slaven support.
“Thank you for sending in advance,” she wrote. “We will review, and we remain committed to working with you on these very important issues. As the President has stated, we stand with educators who are doing right by kids—and we know they/you all need to be protected now more than ever.”
Slaven was in contact with other federal officials after sending the letter to Biden. Anthony Coley, a Justice Department adviser to Garland, asked Slaven for a phone call on Oct. 4, the day that Garland formed the task force to monitor school board threats. Coley sent Slaven a preview of the statement before the Justice Department released it.
The Department of Homeland Security also contacted the association on Oct. 4.
A pair of scientists pleaded guilty to illegally importing potentially toxic lab chemicals and forwarding confidential mRNA vaccine research to China, according to a statement released by the Justice Department (DOJ).
Wu Chenyan and Chen Lianchun, a husband and wife who worked as research scientists for a major American pharmaceutical company, pleaded guilty on May 19 to charges related to their efforts to illicitly gather confidential mRNA research from that company and use it to advance the husband’s own competing laboratory research in China.
Wu worked for multiple pharmaceutical companies throughout his career, including a major corporation unnamed in court documents. Chen also worked at the same company. Wu moved to China in 2010 and opened a laboratory there in 2012 which focused on mRNA vaccine research.
Chen remained in the United States and continued working for the company while Wu was in China from 2012 through 2021. During that time, her research for the company also focused on mRNA vaccines.
Chen repeatedly accessed the company’s computers and copied confidential materials between 2013 and 2018, according to DOJ. She then emailed those materials to her husband in China using her personal email account. The materials included PowerPoints and Word documents with DNA and mRNA sequencing data, and confidential vaccine research & development information.
“The defendants used their placement and access to obtain and illegally share confidential lab research for their own benefit,” FBI Special Agent in Charge Stacey Moy said in a statement.
Wu first appeared on the FBI’s radar in 2019, when one such PowerPoint with his name on it was discovered by authorities while investigating a Chinese man convicted of violating U.S. export controls.
In 2021, Wu closed his lab in China and attempted to move it to the United States. He packed its contents into five separate suitcases and flew to America. He did not declare any of the biological materials on his customs form, nor to the customs officer while passing through inspection.
Nevertheless, customs agents discovered chemical and biological samples in Wu’s possession, along with medical equipment and research documentation, as it had all been found to be improperly packaged.
In all, Wu was carrying nearly 1,000 unlabeled centrifuge tubes, which appeared to contain proteins, and multiple containers of unknown chemicals, the DOJ said. Some samples were even labeled as hazardous, and one bore a skull and crossbones image and the word “harmful if swallowed … toxic if inhaled.”
“These are serious computer fraud and smuggling crimes,” said U.S. Attorney Randy Grossman. “One defendant failed to protect her employer’s confidential and important research, and instead used it to her and her husband’s advantage.”
“Compounding the harm, the other defendant put travelers in harm’s way by illegally transporting his laboratory’s hazardous chemicals back to the United States.”
The saga is just the latest continuation of the DOJ’s ongoing struggle to curb an ever-rising number of China-related economic espionage and intellectual property theft cases. According to the FBI, there are currently over 2,000 active cases related to China-based attempts to steal vital technology and information from the United States.
The department was engaged in a Trump-era effort to curb such cases in a program known as the China Initiative, but the Biden administration scrapped that initiative following allegations of racial bias. The department clarified that an internal review found no evidence of bias, but that its “harmful perception” meant the initiative had to end.
Wu and Chen are both scheduled to be sentenced in August of this year.
WASHINGTON—The FBI lawyer who served as a conduit for flimsy allegations against Donald Trump said May 19 he would have acted differently if he knew Trump’s rival for the presidency, Hillary Clinton, was behind the claims.
James Baker, who now works for Twitter, said that he likely would not have have met with Michael Sussmann, who is accused of passing on data that allegedly linked Trump’s business to a Russian bank, if he knew Sussmann was acting on behalf of the Clinton campaign.
“I don’t think I would have,” Baker said on the stand in federal court in Washington.
Knowing Trump’s opponent was behind the allegations “would have raised very serious questions, certainly, about the credibility of the source” and the “veracity of the information,” Baker said. It would also have heightened “a substantial concern in my mind about whether we were going to be played.”
The testimony bolsters a key piece of special counsel John Durham’s case against Sussmann—that knowing the sources propelling Sussmann to meet with Baker would have altered how the FBI analyzed the information, which the bureau ultimately found did not substantiate the claims of a secret backchannel between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank.
“Absent Sussmann’s false statement, the FBI might have taken additional or more incremental steps before opening and/or closing an investigation,” prosecutors said in Sussmann’s indictment, which charged him with lying to the FBI.
Defense lawyers have argued that the impact of Sussmann’s alleged lie was “trivial or negligible.”
Sussmann met Baker in the FBI lawyer’s office on Sept. 19, 2016, just weeks before the presidential election. No other persons were present.
Baker said Thursday that would not have been the case if he knew the Clinton campaign’s involvement. He said he likely would have directed Sussmann to other FBI personnel—bureau lawyers don’t typically receive information—or would have still met with Sussmann, but made sure other personnel were present.
“I was willing to meet with Michael alone because I had high confidence in him and trust,” said Baker, who has described Sussmann as a friend. “I think I would have made a different assessment if he said he had been appearing on behalf of a client.”
Michael Sussmann arrives at federal court in Washington on May 18, 2022. (Teng Chen/The Epoch Times)
Sussmann told Baker in a text message the night before the meeting that he had sensitive information he wanted to pass on but that he was doing so on his own accord, not on behalf of any clients. Baker testified that Sussmann repeated the lie during the meeting. Sussmann later told a congressional panel that the information was given to him by a client.
“I think it’s most accurate to say it was done on behalf of my client,” Sussmann said, apparently referring to Rodney Joffe, a technology executive who has said he was promised a position in the government if Clinton won the election.
While Sussmann, Joffe, and others worked on the white papers that he ultimately passed to Baker, the lawyer was billing the Clinton campaign, according to billing records. Sussmann also told the campaign about the allegations before he met with Baker, though the campaign allegedly did not approve the meeting.
Sussmann was well-known to the FBI, having worked with the bureau on multiple cases, including the alleged hack of Democratic National Committee servers. Sussmann “had a vibrant national security practice that had contact with the FBI a lot,” Baker said. Sussmann worked for Perkins Coie, which was the Clinton campaign’s law firm during the 2016 election, and has a long history of working with Democrats.
On cross-examination, Sean Berkowitz, representing Sussmann, hammered Baker over inconsistencies in his testimony and what he’s said before.
Baker, for instance, told the Department of Justice Office of Inspector General in 2019 that Sussmann said he had information stemming from “people that were his clients.” Baker said he was using a “shorthand way” of describing the cyberexperts with whom Sussman was working.
In 2018, testifying to a House of Representatives panel behind closed doors, Baker said he couldn’t remember whether he knew at the time that Baker was representing the Clinton campaign. “I don’t know that I had that in my head when he showed up in my office,” Baker said at the time.
“I just find that unbelievable that the guy representing the Clinton campaign, the Democrat National Committee, shows up with information that says we got this, and you don’t ask where he got it, you didn’t know how he got it,” Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) responded.
“I was uncomfortable with being in the position of having too much factual information conveyed to me, because I’m not an agent. And so I wanted to get the information into the hands of the agents as quickly as possible and let them deal with it. If they wanted to go interview Sussmann and ask him all those kinds of questions, fine with me,” Baker said.
According to Baker’s testimony and previous remarks from Sussmann, no agents ended up asking those kinds of questions.
Newly released notes taken by high-level Department of Justice officials at a March 6, 2017 meeting with FBI leadership expose some of the lengths the FBI went to, to cover up their corruption and malfeasance in spying on President Donald Trump.
The notes were released earlier this week by lawyers for Hillary Clinton’s campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann as part of an effort to clear Sussmann for having lied to the FBI. In reality, while the notes do little to exonerate Sussmann, they provide quite a bit to incriminate the FBI.
The meeting at which the notes were taken took place just two days after Trump’s infamous March 4, 2017 tweet in which he accused former President Obama of having wiretapped Trump Tower. Trump’s tweet panicked FBI leadership, who were unsure exactly how much Trump knew about their efforts to set him up. In response to Trump’s tweet, they tried to cover their tracks with another layer of lies and deception.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland to ask why an attack on a Madison, Wisconsin, pro-life center wasn’t being investigated as an act of domestic terrorism.
Late on May 8, the Wisconsin Family Action clinic in Madison was attacked with a Molotov cocktail following the leaked release of a draft Supreme Court majority opinion suggesting the high court would overturn the Roe v. Wade case that made abortion constitutionally protected.
“Attacking a pro-life organization in a manner that could have injured or killed the office’s occupants due to differing political ideologies fits these definitions,” Johnson wrote. “I am unfortunately compelled to write to you about this matter because DOJ [Department of Justice] has a track record of not prosecuting left-wing violence as we have seen with the summer of 2020 riots that occurred nationwide.”
The FBI says domestic terrorism, he added, is an “ideologically driven criminal act, including threats or acts of violence made to specific victims, made in furtherance of a domestic ideological goal that has occurred and can be confirmed.”
The senator also made note of protests, including some that were held over the recent weekend, outside the homes of Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices, describing such incidents as intimidation and a violation of federal law.
“The intimidation of sitting Supreme Court justices is a clear violation of federal law, and, once again, DOJ, FBI, and [the Department of Homeland Security] have yet to condemn these activities,” Johnson wrote. “Compare your silence on these events to your robust actions against parents attending public school board meetings to voice their concerns about far-left ideologies being integrated” in public schools.
Officials in Wisconsin told The Epoch Times last week that they were aware of a left-wing group that carried out the attack on the Madison pro-life group’s office. The group claiming responsibility, Jane’s Revenge, sent a statement to Bellingcat that the arson was a “warning.”
“Next time the infrastructure of the enslavers will not survive,” the group said, adding that if pro-life groups and clinics weren’t disbanded within the next month, it would carry out further attacks.
“Wisconsin is the first flashpoint, but we are all over the U.S., and we will issue no further warnings,” the statement said, adding that they would “adopt increasingly extreme tactics to maintain freedom over our own bodies.”
In the letter, Johnson made reference to the group’s apparent threat.
The Department of Justice didn’t respond by press time to a request for comment.
“In March of 2017 … [then-FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe] is admitting—in a meeting with the team running the Russiagate investigation—that there is no connection between Alfa Bank and Trump Tower,” according to newly released FBI notes, says Kash Patel.
These handwritten FBI and DOJ notes incriminate top officials and expose a conspiracy against Donald Trump, Kash says.
“As the lead Russiagate investigator, I never saw these notes. We asked for them. And they told us—they, the Department of Justice, the FBI—told us they did not exist.”
In this episode, Kash explains what he’s found in these newly released documents and why the judge’s recent order in the Michael Sussmann case was not a huge blow to special counsel John Durham’s case, unlike what many have claimed.
Kash and Jan also take a look at the firestorm of protests occurring outside the homes of Supreme Court justices since the leak of a draft ruling on Roe v. Wade. Will the justices be influenced?
The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced its Joint Criminal Opioid and Darknet Enforcement (JCODE) team joined Europol to arrest 150 people worldwide in Operation Dark HunTor, an effort that seized weapons, drugs and more than $31 million in currencies.
Operation Dark HunTor included arrests across three continents, taking into custody alleged perpetrators across the United States, Australia, and Europe.
A statement from the DOJ noted 65 arrests in the United States, one in Bulgaria, three in France, 47 in Germany, four in the Netherlands, 24 in the United Kingdom, four in Italy, and two in Switzerland.
“This 10-month massive international law enforcement operation spanned across three continents and involved dozens of U.S. and international law enforcement agencies to send one clear message to those hiding on the Darknet peddling illegal drugs: there is no dark internet. We can and we will shine a light,” Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said.
“Operation Dark HunTor prevented countless lives from being lost to this dangerous trade in illicit and counterfeit drugs, because one pill can kill. The Department of Justice with our international partners will continue to crack down on lethal counterfeit opioids purchased on the Darknet,” she added.
The emphasis in the operation was to decrease the flow of illegal drugs internationally. The results included $31.6 million in both cash and virtual currencies; approximately 234 kilograms (kg) of drugs worldwide including 152.1 kg of amphetamine, 21.6 kg of cocaine, 26.9 kg of opioids, and 32.5 kg of MDMA, in addition to more than 200,000 ecstasy, fentanyl, oxycodone, hydrocodone, and methamphetamine pills, and counterfeit medicine; and 45 firearms, according to the statement.
“The men and women of the department’s Criminal Division, in close collaboration with our team of interagency and international partners, stand ready to leverage all our resources to protect our communities through the pursuit of those who profit from addiction, under the false belief that they are anonymous on the Darknet,” Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Polite Jr of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division said.
“Only through a whole of government and, in this case, global approach to tackling cyber-enabled drug trafficking can we hope to achieve the significant results illustrated in Operation Dark HunTor,” he added.
FBI Director Christopher Wray also commented on the widespread, multi-national operation and its impact.
“The FBI continues to identify and bring to justice drug dealers who believe they can hide their illegal activity through the Darknet,” Wray said in the statement.
“Criminal Darknet markets exist so drug dealers can profit at the expense of others’ safety. The FBI is committed to working with our JCODE and EUROPOL law enforcement partners to disrupt those markets and the borderless, worldwide trade in illicit drugs they enable,” he added.
The Justice Department’s watchdog says the nation’s top law enforcement division must do a lot more to restore the public’s faith and dispel the belief among a growing number of Americans that it is a political organization rather than a non-partisan arbiter of cases.
The DOJ “has squandered public trust by straying from its own policies designed to avoid the appearance of political bias and meddling and by permitting some employees to escape accountability for misconduct by leaving the department before investigations were complete, the agency’s chief watchdog is warning,” Just the News reported Thursday, citing the findings of the department’s inspector general, Michael Horowitz.
His office’s criticism of the department comes amid blowback from the public and lawmakers for failures related to the so-called “Trump-Russia collusion” counterterrorism investigation, which has been discredited, as well as the discovery that Attorney General Merrick Garland has tasked the FBI and all 93 U.S. attorneys with assisting in the investigation of parents who complain to school boards about the curriculum being taught to their kids.
Also, the findings come after the FBI raided the homes of Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe and two of his associates, which alarmed even left-leaning civil libertarians.
“The Department faces a challenge in addressing public perception about its objectivity and insulation from political influence,” Horowitz noted in the report, going on to cite recent polling data indicating a growing number of Americans believe the department has become politicized.
“The Department’s efficacy as the guardian of the rule of law depends on maintaining the public trust in its integrity, impartiality, and ability to effectively administer justice,” Horowitz added.
Just The News adds:
The watchdog cited several recent IG investigations that found the James Comey-era FBI misled the FISA court in the Russia case and wrongly usurped prosecutors’ powers by declining prosecution in the Hillary Clinton email probe. He also noted more recent failures, including continuing FISA warrant problems, a bungled sex abuse case involving female Olympians, and reports the department faced pressure to investigate allegations of fraud and misconduct in the 2020 election.
In many instances, rules and policies in those cases weren’t followed, to the detriment of the department’s reputation and public trust, he noted.
“One important strategy that can build public trust in the Department is to ensure adherence to policies and procedures designed to protect DOJ from accusations of political influence or partial application of the law,” Horowitz noted in the report.
To that end, Horowitz went on to say that the public’s trust has been devastated in large part by the department’s failure to discipline culpable officials and instead allow them to retire before final determinations are made and cases are simply closed without any actions being taken.
“Accountability is particularly challenging in instances where the Department employee retires or resigns before allegations of misconduct can be fully adjudicated,” Horowitz wrote, pointing out that 10 percent of the department’s misconduct cases that were pending before the FBI’s Office of Professional Responsibility in the years 2017 and 2018 were closed after the staffer resigned or retired.
“We concluded that this FBI practice adversely impacted the FBI’s ability to hold employees accountable for their misconduct, was unfair to employees wrongly accused, and wasted OIG and FBI resources,” Horowitz wrote.
“Adjudicating all cases to conclusion, as recommended by the OIG, will ensure that employees who choose to leave the FBI while under investigation cannot escape a finding of misconduct that could affect potential future employment and other benefits,” he added.
“Another means of strengthening confidence in the Department is ensuring that attorney professional misconduct matters are handled no differently than misconduct allegations made against law enforcement agents or other DOJ employees,” the IG wrote.
“Currently the Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, a DOJ component that lacks the same statutory independence and protections as the OIG, has exclusive jurisdiction over allegations of misconduct by Department lawyers that relate to an attorney’s responsibility to investigate, litigate, or provide legal advice,” he said.
“Independent oversight of Department lawyers is a step towards broader accountability and improved public trust in the Department.”
The Department of Justice (DOJ) must address deepening concerns that it’s not insulated from political influence, the agency’s watchdog stated in a new report.
The DOJ failed to follow policies and procedures designed to protect it from accusations that it’s politicized or partially applying the law in a number of cases, including while investigating Donald Trump’s campaign during the 2016 election and in leaks to the media, Inspector General Michael Horowitz noted.
“Numerous national events in the past year have crystalized the urgency for the department to address this challenge in a meaningful way,” he wrote, including the discovery that the DOJ under the Trump administration obtained communications to and from members of Congress and accusations that protesters were cleared from Lafayette Square in Washington on June 1, 2020, for political purposes.
Such events “have all raised questions about the department’s objectivity and impartiality” and “negatively impacted the perception of the department as a fair administrator of justice,” Horowitz said.
As proof, the watchdog cited a 2020 poll from the Pew Research Center, which found favorable views of DOJ among Democrats dropped sharply during the Trump administration. Republican views grew more favorable during the same time.
DOJ officials didn’t respond to requests by The Epoch Times for comment.
Critics on both the left and right have said the DOJ in recent years has acted wrongfully. Democrats repeatedly criticized the department during the Trump era, including over its bid to lower the jail sentence of Trump ally Roger Stone. Republicans also found problems with the agency, in particular over its handling of the probe into whether Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia that relied heavily on the now-discredited Steele dossier.
Attorney General Merrick Garland testifies at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in Washington on Oct. 27, 2021. (Tom Brenner/AFP via Getty Images)
Just this week, fresh strong reactions were triggered after a whistleblower said internal documents showed the DOJ used counterterrorism tools against parents.
The documents “prove that the FBI was, in fact, using counterterrorism tools to investigate concerned parents who have attended school board meetings—which directly contradicts Attorney General Merrick Garland’s sworn congressional testimony,” Parents Defending Education said in a statement.
Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, told The Epoch Times that the DOJ “has had a cloud hanging over its credibility for years.”
“From the [Hillary] Clinton email investigation to the Russia probe and targeting parents exercising their First Amendment rights at school board meetings, there’s not been much to boost the public’s confidence that DOJ is apolitical. The inspector general’s assessment seems right on the money to me,” he wrote in an email.
“I hope the department, and its components like the FBI, begin turning a corner to regain some of their previous non-partisan, beyond-reproach reputations. The inspector general also said that he needs testimonial subpoena authority and the ability to independently investigate attorney misconduct. Those two things will go a long way toward ensuring bad apples at FBI and the department are truly held accountable.”
Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) publicly released a letter addressed to Attorney General Merrick Garland questioning contradictory claims by the Department of Justice (DOJ) about Hunter Biden’s connection to Chinese Communist Party (CCP) interests.
The son of President Joe Biden has been in the spotlight since the 2020 election, when a laptop recovered at a computer repair shop revealed distasteful information about the private life and business dealings of Hunter Biden.
However, Hunter Biden was in the crosshairs of the DOJ long before the 2020 presidential election: In a 2018 court filing, the DOJ expressed its intention to gather information under the standards set out in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act on one of Hunter Biden’s many foreign business associates, Chi-Ping “Patrick” Ho (pdf), who is associated with CCP intelligence services.
The DOJ’s request to gather this information was approved by a federal court.
In Dec. 2017, Ho was charged with international bribery and money laundering for the China Energy Fund Committee, a subsidiary of one of China’s largest corporations, which itself has extensive links to the CCP. Ho was a top executive at the firm.
In March of this year, Grassley and Johnson submitted a request to the DOJ, now led by Biden-appointed Garland, asking for information related to investigations concerning Hunter Biden’s foreign relationships.
Following that request, the DOJ sent a belated reply to the senators in July, telling them that the DOJ is “not in a position to confirm the existence of the information that is sought” (pdf).
Now, Grassley and Johnson are asking the DOJ to reconcile these conflicting claims.
“Based on the extensive relationships between and among Hunter Biden and individuals connected to the communist Chinese regime, our letter requested ‘all intelligence records, including but not limited to, all Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act-derived information,’” wrote the senators.
“Our request was based, in part, on reporting and a federal court filing by the Department that said it had obtained at least one Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant relating to Patrick Ho, indicating his potential counterintelligence threat to the United States,” the letter added.
The senators then cited the DOJ’s own words from its 2018 filing, which reads in part, “The United States intends to offer into evidence, or otherwise use or disclose in any proceedings in the above-captioned matter, information obtained or derived from electronic surveillance and physical search conducted pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978.”
“Despite this sworn acknowledgement by the Department you oversee, your July 12, 2021, response to our letter denied knowing whether the Department even possessed the information,” Grassley and Johnson continued.
The duo then blasted the DOJ for the apparent contradiction.
“Both statements cannot be true. Either the statement in your July 12, 2021, letter is true—that the Department is unaware of whether it possesses the relevant material—or the Department’s February 8, 2018, statement to federal court that the Department is aware of the fact that it possesses the relevant material is true,” Grassley and Johnson wrote. “Therefore, one statement is false.”
To reconcile this inconsistency, Grassley and Johnson have demanded an official DOJ response to their letter by no later than Nov. 22 and for the DOJ to “either amend [its] July 12, 2021, letter to correct the inaccurate statement or confirm in writing that the Department’s February 8, 2018, court filing stating that the Department possesses FISA-related information on Patrick Ho was an inaccurate statement to federal court.”
Thus far, the DOJ has not publicly responded to Grassley’s and Johnson’s allegations in the letter.
The DOJ did not immediately respond to a request for a comment on the letter.
FBI spokesperson says bureau not ‘in the business of investigating parents who speak out’
An unnamed whistleblower disclosed documents suggesting that the FBI is using its counterterrorism resources to investigate parents or individuals who threaten school board members, teachers, or other staff, according to a letter sent by the House Judiciary GOP dated Tuesday.
The GOP letter included copies of the documents allegedly sourced from the FBI whistleblower that included an email sent by Carlton L. Peeples, who serves in the bureau’s Inspection Division, saying that the Counterterrorism and Criminal Division “created a threat tag, EDUOFFICIALS, to track instances of related threats.”
“We ask that your offices apply the threat tag to investigations and assessments of threats specifically directed against school board administrators, board members, teachers, and staff,” the email reads. The email was signed by Counterterrorism Division Assistant Director Timothy Langan and then-Criminal Division assistant director Calvin Shivers.
In their letter on Tuesday, the Judiciary Republicans said that Attorney General Merrick Garland testified in front of a House panel that the FBI and Department of Justice were not using counterterrorism resources to target threats against school board members. However, the newly unveiled document, they argued, disproves Garland’s comments.
An FBI spokesperson told The Epoch Times on Tuesday evening that the bureau “has never been in the business of investigating parents who speak out or policing speech at school board meetings, and we are not going to start now.”
“The FBI’s mission is to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution. These are dual and simultaneous and not one at the expense of the other,” the spokesperson said. “We are fully committed to preserving and protecting First Amendment rights, including freedom of speech. The FBI’s focus is on violence and threats of violence that potentially violate federal law.”
Before a counterterrorism investigation can be opened, there has to be information that indicates the possible use of violence or force, or a potential violation of federal law, the FBI spokesperson continued.
But according to House Judiciary Republicans, the whistleblower’s disclosure is evidence that federal law enforcement used counterterrorism resources at the behest of a “left-wing special interests group” to go after parents, referring to a letter that had been sent by the National School Boards Association several weeks ago linking parents who are concerned about school curriculum to domestic terrorists. It further said that the FBI and federal agencies should use the PATRIOT Act and other tools to go after parents.
After the initial letter was sent by the National School Boards Association, Garland issued a memorandum directing the FBI to address an alleged “spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence” and create “dedicated lines of communication for threat reporting” on the matter. But on Oct. 23, the school boards group issued an apology to the White House over the language included in the letter.
Now, the whistleblower’s disclosure “calls into question the accuracy and completeness” of Garland’s testimony before the House Judiciary panel last month.
“If … you were aware of the FBI’s actions at the time of your testimony,” the Republicans wrote, the document “shows that you willfully misled the committee about the” Department of Justice’s use of counterterrorism tools to target parents.
During the House Judiciary Committee hearing, Garland denied allegations that his agency would label concerned parents as domestic terrorists.
“Justice Department supports and defends the First Amendment right of parents to complain as vociferously as they wish about the education of their children, about the curriculum taught in the schools,” he told lawmakers on Oct. 21.
Garland also suggested that Republicans were mischaracterizing his memorandum, saying it only pertains to threats of violence aimed at school employees and teachers.
“This is not about what happens inside school board meetings,” the attorney general remarked. “It’s only about threats of violence and violence aimed at school officials, school employees, and teachers.”
After the National School Boards Association issued its initial letter, dozens of school boards around the United States have cut ties with the group. On Monday, the Kentucky School Board Association said its members voted to withdraw their membership.
Republican Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio and Virginia Foxx of North Carolina are seeking access to communications between the Department of Education and the National School Boards Association over a letter from the latter comparing protesting parents to domestic terrorists.
In a letter to Education Secretary Miguel Cardona exclusively shared with the Washington Examiner, the representatives demanded the department turn over all communications with the NSBA, the Department of Justice, and the White House regarding the September letter asking President Joe Biden to investigate protesting parents as domestic terrorists.
Jordan told the Washington Examiner the push for accountability from the agency is important because “moms and dads should be the ones making decisions about their kids, not the government. This idea that somehow the government is smarter than parents is ridiculous.”
The NSBA has since apologized for the September letter, which infamously prompted Attorney General Merrick Garland to issue a memo forming an FBI-DOJ task force to investigate parents protesting at school board meetings. Emails later showed the White House had coordinated with the NSBA on the release of the letter.
Jordan and Foxx are the ranking members for the House Judiciary Committee and the Committee on Education and Labor, respectively.
The letter asks for communications between administration officials and the NSBA regarding the appointment of the association’s president, Viola Garcia, to the National Assessment Governing Board, which publishes the National Assessment of Educational Progress, also known as the “nation’s report card.”
Judicial Watch has received first-hand evidence from the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department that the shooting death of Ashli Babbitt was “unjustified,” the conservative activist group announced on Nov.10.
The organization said in a statement that it has received new audio, video footage and photo records pertaining to the shooting death of Babbitt, including a cellphone video of the shooting itself, as well as a short police interview of the shooter, U.S. Capitol Police (USCP) officer, Lt. Michael Byrd.
Babbitt, 35, was among the crowd that breached the Capitol on Jan. 6, interrupting a joint session of Congress convened to certify the presidential election’s electoral votes. As she attempted to climb through a broken window into the Speaker’s Lobby, adjacent to the House chamber, she was shot by Byrd.
Babbitt, who was unarmed, was soon declared dead.
Judicial Watch obtained the material through a May 2021 Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
Records include a new cellphone video, which has been edited by the D.C. Police and shows officers reacting to the shooting. The footage, which is 1.27 minutes long, depicts a chaotic scene as dozens of officers walk up a stairwell and approach a group of protesters inside the building before attempting to pull some of them away. The faces of those in the video have been blurred out however their voices can be heard.
The documents also include photos of the area where Babbitt died, which show broken glass and chairs piled up in the speaker’s lobby. There are also D.C. Police photographs of Byrd, his hands, and his gun, as well as pictures of a folding knife, which was allegedly found in Babbitt’s pocket.
There is also a 16 minute 40 second audio recording of police interviewing Byrd on the day of the incident. The voices in that interview and others have been digitally altered to try to hide the identities of those involved.
Byrd had defended shooting Babbitt and claimed that he issued verbal warnings before opening fire but admitted that he did not know Babbitt was unarmed.
“She was posing a threat to the United States House of Representatives,” Byrd said on NBC in August.
“I could not fully see her hands or what was in the backpack or what the intentions are,” Byrd said. “But they had shown violence leading up to that point,” he added.
Terrell Roberts, who is representing the Babbitt family, has told The Epoch Times that the killing was “a pretty clear case of shooting an unarmed person without any legal justification.”
Last month, Judicial Watch released records from the D.C. Police showing that multiple police officers claimed they did not see a weapon in Babbitt’s hand before Byrd shot her. One officer attested that he didn’t hear any verbal commands before Byrd fired at Babbitt.
Byrd was cleared in April this year by both the Department of Justice and the agency he works for following a “thorough investigation.”
“Officials examined video footage posted on social media, statements from the officer involved and other officers and witnesses to the events, physical evidence from the scene of the shooting, and the results of an autopsy,” the DOJ said in a statement.
“Based on that investigation, officials determined that there is insufficient evidence to support a criminal prosecution.”
Two police officers and four protesters died during and following the Jan. 6 Capitol breach.
“These recordings and photos provide dramatic, first-hand evidence that the shooting death of Ashli Babbitt was unjustified,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “It is disturbing that neither the Pelosi Congress nor the Biden/Garland DOJ took no action over this needless death.”
The revelation that Democratic operative Charles Dolan was one of the sources for the dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele shows the FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) withheld information from congressional investigators, Kash Patel said Friday.
“I’m the lead Russia guy, and I had never heard of this guy,” Patel said. “It means, to me, the FBI, DOJ under Rod Rosenstein withheld information that was critical to the Russiagate investigation that we were running in 2017, 2018. And who knows what else they’ve left out?”
Patel was an investigator for the House Intelligence Committee. He was speaking on “Kash’s Corner,” a program he hosts on EpochTV. Rosenstein was deputy attorney general under former President Donald Trump and appointed Special Counsel Robert Mueller to investigate the Trump-Russia collusion theories.
Igor Danchenko, Steele’s primary sub-source, was charged last week with making false statements to federal investigators. One of the counts stems from Danchenko denying he spoke with a person dubbed “PR-Executive-1” in the federal indictment.
Dolan has had a relationship with former President Bill Clinton and former First Lady Hillary Clinton since the 1990s. Dolan campaigned on behalf of the latter in the 2016 presidential election. Hillary Clinton’s campaign helped pay for Steele’s dossier, which targeted then-candidate Donald Trump. The dossier has been shown to be riddled with false information.
The House Intelligence Committee, headed by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) while Republicans controlled the House following the election, sent letters and subpoenas to the FBI and Department of Justice for all documentation relating to the dossier, including all the connections that he and the FBI had throughout the scandal known as Russiagate, Patel said on his show.
“Charles Dolan never came up once. Me nor not one member of my team, nor any of the Republicans on House Intel, had ever heard of Charles Dolan until John Durham’s indictment,” Patel said, referring to Special Counsel John Durham.
As further evidence of what he described as the FBI and DOJ purposefully withholding information, Patel pointed to how the indictment reveals agents interviewed Danchenko on five different occasions. According to DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s 2019 examination of the dossier and related matters, only three interviews with Danchenko took place.
“They did not admit that to us when we were investigating the Russiagate investigation. I think we added at most two or three instances of an interview and we never got the full contents anyway,” Patel said. “Now there’s five. Where did that come from?”
“Why didn’t the FBI tell us this,” he added later. “Why did Rod Rosenstein withhold these documents and this information, even though Congress sent him subpoenas? They only turned over part of it, and what they did turn over, a lot of it was redacted. And that’s why we’re fighting such an uphill battle to disclose it to the American public, the full story.”
The FBI and DOJ didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. Rosenstein could not be reached.
The action against James O’Keefe has prompted concern about the Biden administration’s commitment to the First Amendment.
The Biden administration’s effort to establish itself as a committed champion of press freedom is facing new doubts because of the Justice Department’s aggressive legal tactics against a conservative provocateur known for his hidden-camera video stings.
A predawn FBI raid last weekend against Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe and similar raids on some of his associates are prompting alarm from some First Amendment advocates, who contend that prosecutors appear to have run roughshod over Justice Department media policies and a federal law protecting journalists.
Adding to the drama surrounding the brewing court showdown: It stems from a politically sensitive investigation into the alleged theft of the diary of President Joe Biden’s daughter Ashley.
That document made it into the hands of O’Keefe’s organization, Project Veritas, which never published anything on the subject and eventually turned the document over to police.
An ensuing federal investigation resulted in the FBI raid on O’Keefe’s home in Westchester County, N.Y., at 6 a.m. last Saturday to seize his cell phones pursuant to a court order. O’Keefe says he stood handcuffed in his underwear in a hallway as almost a dozen agents — one carrying a battering ram — searched for the phones.
The politically fraught episode is shaping up as an early test of the vows from Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland to show greater respect for the media and to back away from the confrontational, often hostile approach favored by former President Donald Trump and his administration.
“This is just beyond belief,” said University of Minnesota law professor Jane Kirtley, a former executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “I’m not a big fan of Project Veritas, but this is just over the top. I hope they get a serious reprimand from the court because I think this is just wrong.”
O’Keefe’s lawyers complained to a federal judge this week that the raid unfairly denied him the legal protections afforded to journalists.
“The Department of Justice’s use of a search warrant to seize a reporter’s notes and work product violates decades of established Supreme Court precedent,” O’Keefe lawyer Paul Calli wrote to prosecutors.
O’Keefe’s lawyers are demanding that the court appoint a special master to supervise the review of the information on his phones, which they contend contains sensitive details about confidential sources, as well as privileged communication with Project Veritas’ attorneys.
Such a process is uncommon, but has been used in recent years to sift through information seized in federal investigations into two of Trump’s personal attorneys, Michael Cohen and Rudy Giuliani.
On Thursday, Manhattan-based U.S. District Court Judge Analisa Torres issued a one-page order giving prosecutors one day to confirm they have “paused [their] extraction and review of the contents” of O’Keefe’s cell phones. Torres — an appointee of President Barack Obama — has not yet ruled on O’Keefe’s request for a special master, who is typically a retired judge.
Project Veritas was facing a jury trial in Washington next month in the suit brought by Democracy Partners, a Democratic consulting firm it infiltrated, but on Thursday, a judge postponed the trial due to the raids and the unfolding legal fight over them.
At the center of the gathering legal storm is a pivotal question: Is O’Keefe a journalist in the eyes of the law?
O’Keefe’s attorneys insist that despite his evident political bent and his unorthodox — sometimes deceptive — tactics, he qualifies as a journalist under a federal statute and Justice Department regulations aimed at sharply restricting the use of search warrants and similar steps against members of the media.
Prosecutors insist they’ve complied with those requirements, but have thus far been cagey about whether or not they’re treating O’Keefe as a member of the press.
“The Government hereby confirms that it has complied with all applicable regulations and policies regarding potential members of the news media in the course of this investigation, including with respect to the search warrant at issue,” prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan wrote Monday in a letter to O’Keefe’s lawyers obtained by POLITICO.
At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last month, Garland was asked who qualifies as a journalist under Justice Department policies. “It’s very difficult to make that kind of definition,” he said.
O’Keefe is certainly not a typical journalist. Indeed, several of his outfit’s major hidden-camera exposés have been directed at employees of major news organizations such as CNN and NPR, seeking to paint them as left-wing activists. (At least one such attempt was foiled in 2017 when Washington Post reporters suspected they were being set up and effectively turned the tables on O’Keefe’s operatives.)
While many of O’Keefe’s tactics are unsavory, they are far from unknown in the mainstream press. Hidden-camera stings and undercover reporting have fallen out of fashion at most traditional news organizations, but they were once a staple of network television news magazines.
In the 1970s, the Chicago Sun-Times bought a rundown bar and rigged it out with hidden cameras, successfully capturing city inspectors demanding bribes. NBC’s popular and controversial series, “To Catch a Predator,” revolves around hidden-camera stings.
O’Keefe’s rather overt political agenda is also in line with a long American tradition of advocacy journalism. And many conservatives view mainstream news outlets as pervasively liberal in their worldview even as most claim to be neutral in their reporting.
Some of O’Keefe’s practices do seem highly unusual. A poorly redacted pleading filed in the civil suit Project Veritas was set to face trial on next month indicates that O’Keefe encouraged a colleague to tell potential donors they could provide “input” on the timing of release of Project Veritas’ work, raising the specter that O’Keefe was essentially operating under the direct control of political benefactors.
“Real news organizations — whether Fox News, the New York Times or any other recognized media outlet — do not go to their donors, or advertisers, and ask for their ‘input’ on when stories should be run,” attorneys for Democracy Partners said in the court filing.
Kirtley, the Minnesota law professor, warned against denying legal protections to Project Veritas based on its political outlook or its tactics. She also noted that Trump repeatedly accused mainstream media outlets of both unethical practices and of having a political ax to grind.
“Trump’s been saying that about the New York Times for seven years,” she said. “It’s very dangerous to try to categorize people doing journalistic-type work, even if they’re not doing it the way I would do it or the way the mainstream media would do it or the way ethical journalists would do it,” Kirtley said.
Another First Amendment advocate, Trevor Timm of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, also said the raids on Project Veritas were worrying.
“I don’t personally like Project Veritas at all, but imagine this was a liberal org under Trump. Not a good precedent,” he wrote on Twitter.
However, legal experts cautioned that even if Project Veritas and O’Keefe qualify as journalists under the law or Justice Department policy, that did not give them license to violate the law.
“If they’ve got evidence that [Project Veritas] has broken the law, then we’re in a completely different world here,” Kirtley said.
Precisely how the Biden daughter’s diary came into the organization’s possession is unclear, but there have been no public indications thus far that — if the diary was stolen — the conservative group planned the theft or helped carry it out.
Court papers provided to the Project Veritas founder when his phones were seized last weekend indicate that his devices were taken as part of an investigation that prosecutors are conducting into potential conspiracy to traffic stolen goods across state lines, as well as accessory-after-the-fact and misprision of a felony.
Precisely what the government told U.S. Magistrate Judge Sarah Cave to get the warrant used to seize O’Keefe’s phones is unclear and remains under seal.
But the bare-bones outline of the investigation contained in the warrant has fueled the concerns of First Amendment advocates because the Supreme Court ruled in 2001 that media outlets cannot be held liable for publishing information that may have been obtained illegally, as long as they themselves obtained the material legally.
Project Veritas’ lawyer, Calli, acknowledged in an interview on Fox News’ “Hannity” last week that O’Keefe’s group “agreed to pay money for the right to publish” the purported Biden diary. Calli said lawyers for the sources assured Project Veritas that the diary had been obtained lawfully, but the group’s only information on how it was obtained came from the sources.
Calli told the court in a letter earlier this week that the sources told Project Veritas they obtained the diary after Ashley Biden abandoned it at a home in Delray Beach, Fla.
Lawyers tracking the case say the publicly available facts suggest two possibilities: the Justice Department deemed O’Keefe did not qualify as a journalist under DOJ guidelines and federal law known as the Privacy Protection Act, or concluded that he was a member of the media, but that Project Veritas’ personnel may still have committed a crime.
Some language in the warrant suggests prosecutors are examining whether a bidding process for the diary violated laws against fencing stolen items.
However, Calli insists that even if the FBI suspects O’Keefe or others of crimes, Justice Department policy required prosecutors to negotiate for Project Veritas’ materials rather than seizing them.
“The principles that informed this guidance are no less applicable where the news-gathering activities focus on the President’s daughter,” Calli wrote in the motion seeking a special master.
Emails obtained by POLITICO show prosecutors declined to tell Calli whether the Project Veritas searches were approved by a Justice Department committee that oversees investigations impacting the news media.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan declined to comment on the office’s handling of the inquiry. A Justice Department spokesperson also declined comment.
Over the past six months, Biden and Garland have introduced extraordinarily protective policies toward the press, protections so robust that some national security professionals have raised concerns. However, the fight with Project Veritas raises questions about how broadly the new administration intends to apply those robust protections.
“This is really a test in this administration of whether they’re going to put their money where their mouth is,” Kirtley said. “If they’re trying to be seen as great champions of press freedom, this is a pretty bad way to start.”
NCSBA’s separation follows the South Carolina, Ohio, and Missouri School Board Associations’ cutting ties from the NSBA after its Sept. 29 letter to the White House comparing parents to domestic terrorists.
Union County Public Schools Board Chair Melissa Merrell was on her way to an NCSBA convention when she received an alert from the NCSBA announcing its separation.
“It was a pleasant surprise,” Merrell told The Epoch Times. “I definitely did not see this coming. I’ve had a couple of board members who had been requesting and sending emails to the NCSBA asking if it were going to withdraw our membership from the NSBA, and they (the NSBA) had asked for our feedback, and then, on the way to the convention, we saw this message.”
Merrell said nothing was mentioned at the convention about the NCSBA’s departure from the national board.
According to Parents Defending Education (PDE), an organization that investigates indoctrination in schools, as of Nov. 9, 26 states have distanced themselves from the NSBA after the letter.
The NSBA, which represents more than 90,000 school board members and 14,000 public school districts in the United States, had written a letter to President Joe Biden asking that the parents who have protested COVID-19 restrictions and the teaching of critical race theory in public schools be regarded as domestic terrorists that should be investigated by agencies such as the U.S. Department of Justice and the FBI.
This led to Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Oct. 4 memorandum to the FBI directing the agency to work with U.S. attorneys to “facilitate the discussion of strategies for addressing threats against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff, and will open dedicated lines of communication for threat reporting, assessment, and response.”
“The September 29 letter from NSBA to President Biden, in both its inflammatory language and the request for federal agencies to intervene in our communities, was just one in a series of lapses in governance,” said NCSBA President Amy Churchill in a press release. “NCSBA shares its members’ concerns about safety at school board meetings. As a proponent of local control, NCSBA believes that local law enforcement is in the best position to respond to those concerns and seek outside assistance if necessary.”
On Oct. 22, the NSBA issued an apology, stating that “there was no justification for some of the language included in the letter.”
State Response
The PDE requested statements from 47 states affiliated with the NSBA, and reported that the Alabama Association of School Boards (AASB) said it “has withheld its dues to join the NSBA for the current membership year, though AASB’s bylaws require it to be an NSBA member.”
According to the PDE, the AASB said it would be voting in December on changes to its bylaws that would give the AASB board of directors authority to determine its membership with the NSBA.
The PDE said it received no response from the Massachusetts Association of School Committees (MSCA), prompting the PDE to file a public record request for emails “to get a sense of their position.”
“It turns out that Glenn Koocher, executive director of the MSCA, was so happy about the letter that he put it in an email to NSBA CEO Chip Slaven,” the PDE said.
“We in MASC are all very happy that the NSBA has reached out to the FBI and, based on local coverage, has been identified as a key agent for generating federal support,” Koocher said in the email.
Thirty-six Republican state representatives asked that the South Carolina School Boards Association (SCSBA) end its NSBA membership.
“NSBA has labeled parents as domestic terrorists, with no evidence to justify that term,” the House Republicans wrote in a letter to the SCSBA executive director. “The reality is that parents and stakeholders are beyond frustrated being ignored and left out of decisions with their child. The NSBA is detached from reality and fails to recognize that Americans are angered by what is happening in our classrooms.”
SCSBA Executive Director Scott Price told The Epoch Times that the decision to separate from the NSBA was “aimed at protecting our membership from fallout from NSBA’s September 29 letter.”
“Any pressure that SCSBA was under stemmed primarily from our desire to keep this from impacting our members (local school boards),” Price said.
The NSBA did not respond immediately to a request for comment.
GQ Pan and Ivan Pentchoukov contributed to this report.
Attorneys for the Project Vertitas founder believe that the Department of Justice has been tipping off the New York Times about raids on current and former employees.
The company has been scrutinized regarding the theft of a diary purported to belong to President Joe Biden’s daughter, Ashley Biden, that the company never published, The Daily Mail reported.
The FBI conducted raids at O’Keefe’s New York home and those of others connected to Project Veritas early Saturday morning, seizing two of O’Keefe’s cell phones, among other items.
Days later, on Thursday, the New York Times published a report based on memos from the group’s lawyer, revealing his legal advice on the group’s use of false identities and undercover filming, tactics that are eschewed by most modern journalists.
Later that day, a federal judge ordered the DOJ to stop extracting data from the phones, grating a request from O’Keefe’s legal team made the day before for an independent party to be appointed to oversee the review of the confiscated devices.
O’Keefe’s attorney Harmeet Dhillon in an interview on Thursday night slammed the Times’ report as a ‘hit piece’ and questioned whether the DOJ had leaked the legal memos to the Times, an extraordinary and possibly illegal step.
“I can’t say how the New York Times got this information, but they got it in a way that is illegal and unethical,” she said on Fox News.
“We have a disturbing situation of the US Attorney’s office or the FBI tipping off the New York Times to each of the raids on Project Veritas current and former employees,” the attorney said.
“We know that because minutes after these raids occurred they got calls from the New York Times which was the only journalism outlet that knew about it. And they published this hit piece today, which is really despicable. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this low from the New York Times before, to publish people’s private legal communications,” she said.
“This is a scandal of epic proportions. Every journalist who is not worried about this should hang up their journalism card, and all First Amendment lawyers as well,” she said.
The attorney gave credit to District Court Judge Analisa Torres for a Thursday decision that ordered the DOJ to stop taking data from O’Keefe’s phone.
“We are gratified that the Department of Justice has been ordered to stop extracting and reviewing confidential and privileged information obtained in their raids of our reporters, including legal, donor, and confidential source communications.
‘The First Amendment won a temporary victory today, but Project Veritas has a long way to go to hold the DOJ and FBI accountable for their actions,” she said.
She said that the federal government grabbing information pertaining to Project Veritas’ employees containing donor information, communications with attorneys and sources from within the Biden administration raise “multiple First Amendment issues.”
“We went to the court and asked the court to order a special master to review this information and not let the Southern District of New York prosecutors and the FBI look at it without somebody separating out this information,” she said to Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
“The government would not agree to do that voluntarily but we went to court and today a federal judge did order the government to stop looking at these phones. So ultimately, we’re going to get some answers as to what was reviewed and what they did with it,” the attorney said.
“The DOJ has specific regulations about this. There’s also a federal statute called the Privacy Protection Act that protects journalists and their information from exactly this type of thuggish behavior that the DOJ has done in this case,” she said.
“They have blown federal law, they blown the Constitution, they blown due process and civil rights and now they’re so easily communicating in some level for sure with the New York Times,” she said.
NSBA leaders even altered the letter’s text to satisfy the Biden White House
Newly released internal emails reveal that the National School Boards Association coordinated with the White House and the Department of Justice before sending President Biden the notorious letter that compared concerned parents to domestic terrorists. Emails provided to Fox News show that NSBA had coordinated with the White House for weeks beforehand.
Viola Garcia, the NSBA president whom the Department of Education later named to a federal board, sent a memo to NSBA members on Oct. 11 (but dated Oct. 12), providing a timeline of the NSBA’s interaction with the White House ahead of the letter to Biden, which the NSBA sent on Sept. 29.
Five days later, on Oct. 4, the DOJ issued a memo directing law enforcement to investigate threats to school boards. On Oct. 22, the NSBA issued an apology for the letter.
“Concern over the current climate for school board members is also a top priority as disruptions at school board meetings grow and members face growing threats,” Garcia wrote at the time, according to the memo obtained by Parents Defending Education through a Freedom of Information Act request. “NSBA has been actively engaged with the White House, Department of Justice, Department of Homeland Security, Department of Education, Surgeon General, and other federal agencies on pandemic related issues.”
(Oregon School Boards Association)
“In the September 14, 2021 meeting of the [NSBA Organization of State Association Executive Directors] liaison group, they were informed there had been a meeting with White House staff that morning and that NSBA was preparing to send a letter to the President. Subsequently, on September 17, 2021, the interim Executive Director emailed notice to the state association executive directors that indicated a letter requesting federal assistance would be sent.”
“In response to the letter sent by NSBA, on October 4, 2021 the Attorney General announced in a memorandum widely shared throughout the U.S. Department of Justice that he was ordering all U.S. Attorney Offices and local FBI offices to reach out to local and state law enforcement officials to coordinate efforts on this problem within 30 days of the memorandum,” Garcia also noted.
This statement appears to contradict Attorney General Merrick Garland’s testimony to Congress on Oct. 27. When Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., asked Garland if he had “second thoughts” following NSBA’s apology for the letter, he said that the DOJ memorandum did not rely upon the letter.
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., calls out the attorney general for his memo directing the FBI to look into reports of threats against school board members and has harsh words for teachers union leader Randi Weingarten.
“The letter that was subsequently sent does not change the association’s concern of violence or threats of violence. It alters some of the language in the letter … that we did not rely on and is not contained in my own memorandum,” Garland said.
Neither Garland nor the DOJ responded to Fox News’ request for comment by press time.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland appears before the House Judiciary Committee oversight hearing on Oct. 21. (Michael Reynolds/Pool via REUTERS)
Another email exclusively sent to Fox News revealed that NSBA had discussed the issues with the White House “for weeks” before sending the letter. Garcia and Chip Slaven, an NSBA executive, altered the text of the letter to satisfy the curiosity of White House staff.
“In talks over the last several weeks with White House staff, they requested additional information on some of the specific threats, so the letter also details many of the incidents that have been occurring,” Slaven wrote in a September 29, 2021, email to the NSBA board of directors.
Parents have spoken up at school board meetings around the country, protesting harsh COVID-19 mitigation measures like school closures, and raising their voices against transgender policies, critical race theory, and other issues. The letter warned that these parents pose a violent threat to school boards, even going so far as comparing them to domestic terrorists.
The fallout from the letter has proven particularly severe. Ohio’s, Wisconsin‘s, and the school boards of nine other states have reportedly terminated their relationships with NSBA, and parent’s education rights organizations have grown in prominence since the letter. The letter may have also emboldened concerned parents who supported Republican Glenn Youngkin, who won the Virginia governor’s race earlier this month.
Virginia Republican gubernatorial nominee Glenn Youngkin gestures during a [Loudoun Parents Matter Rally] campaign event in Leesburg, Virginia, on Nov. 1, 2021. (REUTERS/Elizabeth Frantz)
Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe responded to a weekend FBI search of his apartment during an interview on Monday, saying agents handcuffed him and threw him against a wall.
In his first public remarks about the matter, O’Keefe confirmed the FBI raid at his Westchester County, New York, home after neighbors told media outlets over the weekend that agents showed up at his door on Saturday. Agents also searched the homes of Project Veritas associates a day earlier, O’Keefe confirmed in a video posted to Vertias’ YouTube channel.
“I woke up to a pre-dawn raid,” O’Keefe told Fox News host Sean Hannity. “Banging on my door, I went to my door to answer the door and there were 10 FBI agents with a battering ram, white blinding lights, they turned me around, handcuffed me, and threw me against the hallway. I was partially clothed in front of my neighbors. They confiscated my phone. They raided my apartment.”
Last week, O’Keefe said that Veritas associates’ homes were raided after the group allegedly received the missing diary of President Joe Biden’s daughter, Ashley. It was never published, he said.
His phone had reporters’ notes from sources unrelated to the Ashley Biden diary as well as confidential donor information, O’Keefe said. Agents spent about two hours searching his apartment, and two of his phones were confiscated.
“This is an attack on the First Amendment by the Department of Justice,” he said. “I’ve heard ‘the process is the punishment.’ I didn’t really understand what that meant until this weekend. And Sean, I wouldn’t wish this on any journalist,” he continued.
O’Keefe’s attorney Paul Calli, who appeared next to the Project Veritas founder in the interview, said Project Veritas paid alleged tipsters for the diary for “the right to publish the material.” The group instead handed it over to local law enforcement, he added.
O’Keefe then added that journalists need to stand against the FBI’s alleged targeting of his group.
“A source comes to us with information, I didn’t even decide to publish it. If they can do this to me, if they can do it to this journalist and raid my home and take my reporter notes, they’ll do it to any journalist,” O’Keefe remarked. “This is about something very fundamental in this country. I don’t know which direction this country is going in. But journalists everywhere have to rise up because we broke no laws here. If they can do it to me, they’ll do it to anybody.”
In a statement on YouTube on Friday, O’Keefe said he was told in a grand jury indictment to not discuss the FBI search but decided to speak out after New York Times reporters contacted Project Veritas reporters for comment within an hour of the raids being carried out. He then questioned how the NY Times obtained information about the searches and what they were about.
The Epoch Times has contacted the FBI for comment.
Over the weekend, an FBI spokesperson confirmed that “a court-authorized law enforcement action” was carried out “in furtherance of an ongoing investigation” in response to questions about O’Keefe’s home being searched.
Representative Paul Gosar accused the Biden administration of keeping “two secret lists” that it uses to deny constitutional rights to political opponents. He pointed to a specific instance of denying an opponent the ability to possess a firearm.
Laura Loomer, an activist and congressional candidate, was mentioned in particular by Gosar in his letter, detailing how she was put on one of these lists without any specific cause.
Gosar published the letter on October 28th, which was addressed to Attorney General Merrick Garland, alluding to how the government is politicizing secret lists in order “to strip American citizens of their constitutional rights.”
“Between the No Fly List and the NICS List,” the letter asserted, “there are two secret lists the government uses to strip American citizens of their constitutional rights. But they do so in secret. With no charges. No hearing. No due process. It is a remnant from Soviet Russia and it needs to end.”
In the letter, Gosar wrote:
“I write to you today regarding innocent American citizens that are being stripped of their Second Amendment rights without due process and subjected to secretive lists that revoke constitutional rights without recourse. This troubling trend has affected an unknown amount of U.S. citizens. Secretive lists are increasingly being used to deny law abiding citizens, who have not committed a crime or used drugs, their constitutional rights.
This dubious practice by your department of disarming innocent Americans without due process is unacceptable and unconstitutional.”
Gosar was referring to a specific case, where Loomer found herself being mistakently listed as a prohibited possessor of a firearm. This was done despite Loomer not commiting any action to merit such a classification.
“Laura Loomer, a former Arizona resident now U.S. congressional candidate in Florida’s 11th district,” Gosar added, “recently contested her listing on the NICS index.”
The Arizona Congressman expanded on the FBII’s abusive behavior:
“The FBI never notified Loomer that she was placed in the NICS database, despite the fact that she had a gun at the time she was in the NICS database. Loomer only found out she was on the NICS list when she applied for a concealed carry CCW permit in Florida, and her application was denied. Even after being denied, Loomer had to make several more inquiries as to why she was denied.”
As Gosar pointed out in the letter, had Loomer been caught possessing a firearm that she was legally allowed to own – despite the NICS database mistakenly showing otherwise – she could’ve ended up in a complete legal fiasco. Gosar added, “Loomer could have still legally had a gun in Florida without carrying, and she never would have known that the FBI had banned her from being able to own a firearm. This begs the question, was the FBI trying to entrap Ms. Loomer, and how many other American citizens who are also in the FBI NICS database have not yet been notified that they have also been banned from owning and possessing firearms?”
Loomer published her own statement addresing the matter, where she revealed that she’s going to be working with Gosar to resolve her predicament. “Congressman Gosar asked the FBI whether or not they were trying to entrap me when they illegally red flagged me,” Loomer stated, “BANNING me from ever being able to own or possess a firearm, without ever notifying me when they placed me on the NICS database after I confronted former FBI Director James Comey.”
Loomer continued:
“I’m pleased to announce I will be working with Congressman Gosar on ANTI-RED FLAG legislation so the FBI & DOJ can no longer politically target Americans & strip them of their Second Amendment Rights!”
Pro-Gun News reached out to Loomer for comment.
She noted that her episode with the anti-gun episode began after she “confronted James Comey.” Loomer added that the FBI is “clearly retaliating against people.”
Loomer stressed she “had a gun and was never notified that I was on the NICS list.”
This incident Loomer is currently facing just demonstrates how depraved the gun control regime in Washington, DC has become.
Any serious right-wing candidate would make the defunding, if not the outright abolition, of NICS a priority.
Lawful individuals should not be subject to federal gun control laws. Last time I checked, federal gun control regulations are not authorized by the Constitution.
Charles Dolan’s involvement in the dossier saga flips Democrats’ allegations of Russian collusion on their head
The Clinton operative who provided information for the infamous Steele dossier worked for years for the Russian government and its state-owned gas giant Gazprom, though his activities are not disclosed in foreign agent filings with the Department of Justice.
Charles Dolan, a longtime Democratic operative and public-relations maven, worked as a senior consultant for the Russian government from 2006 to 2014 and in 2016 had extensive contacts with high-level Russian officials, according to an indictment unsealed Thursday by Special Counsel John Durham. Dolan in 2016 also fed information to Igor Danchenko, a Russian analyst who served as the primary source for Christopher Steele, a former British spy who investigated Donald Trump on behalf of the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. During the years he worked for Russia, Dolan was not registered with the Justice Department under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, according to a review of government records.
Dolan’s involvement in the dossier saga flips Democrats’ allegations of Trump-Russia collusion on their head. Democrats have long accused the Trump campaign of having illicit ties to Russia. Special Counsel John Durham on Thursday indicted Danchenko for lying to the FBI about his contacts with Dolan. Danchenko had denied that Dolan provided any information to him that made its way to Steele. The FBI relied heavily on Steele’s since-discredited dossier for its investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
The indictment lists Dolan’s extensive work for the Clintons and says he took part in events and calls as a volunteer for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. It does not identify Dolan by name, but his attorneys confirmed that he is the person referenced in the indictment as “PR Executive 1.” Dolan is a partner at public relations firm kglobal. He is also on the board of directors of the International Foundation for Electoral Systems, a nonprofit group that says it “advances democracy for a better future.”
The Justice Department requires individuals who work on behalf of foreign governments to disclose their influence activities. Other filings submitted by Ketchum Inc., the firm where Dolan worked through 2014, show that the company had extensive contacts with U.S. media outlets during the course of its work for Russia. Dolan is listed in two filings submitted by Ketchum. Those show that in 2012 hereceived $157,000 to cover out-of-pocket expenses. Dozens of other employees at Ketchum are registered as foreign agents of Russia and Gazprom during the same period.
While Dolan was not widely known before he surfaced in the Durham investigation, he has extensive contacts in Washington. He was photographed with then-vice president Joe Biden in February 2014, while he was still working for Russia.
According to the indictment, Dolan provided Danchenko information about former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort that ended up in the dossier. Danchenko had asked Dolan to share any “thought, allegation, or rumor” about Manafort. Dolan told Danchenko that a Republican friend of his had shared insights about turmoil regarding Manafort within the Trump campaign. The information would later appear in one of the memos from the Steele dossier. Dolan told the FBI that he lied to Danchenko about speaking with a Republican friend about Manafort.
Dolan was also involved in perhaps the most controversial allegation in the dossier. According to the indictment, Dolan and an associate spoke with staff members of the Ritz Carlton in Moscow about Donald Trump’s stay there years earlier. The dossier alleges that the Russian government has video footage of Trump with prostitutes at the hotel. But according to the indictment, Dolan said that none of the hotel staff members to whom he spoke mentioned any sexual activity.
The indictment also reveals that an official at the Brookings Institution, a prominent liberal think tank, introduced Danchenko to Dolan around a decade ago. Steele in 2017 told the FBI that Brookings senior fellow Fiona Hill introduced him to Danchenko around 2011, according to documents declassified last year. Hill is not identified by name in the indictment, but documents released last year by the government identify her as the person who introduced Danchenko to Steele. Hill served as the Russia expert for the National Security Council during the Trump administration.
It is unclear whether Durham asked Dolan about his work for Russia or his failure to register as a foreign agent. Dolan and his lawyer did not respond to requests for comment.
In 2014, Soros’s International Renaissance Foundation (IRF) and its grantees were active supporters in the creation of the Anti-Corruption Action Centre (AntAC) of Ukraine, a powerful NGO. Through the end of 2018, 17 percent of AntAC’s funding was coming from Soros’s group.
AntAC is run by Daria Kaleniuk, an American-educated lawyer. White House logs show Kaleniuk visited on December 9, 2015, reportedly meeting with Eric Ciaramella, the CIA employee many suspect is the anonymous whistleblower that sparked Trump’s first impeachment, the source of which was a faultless phone call with Ukraine’s president.
AntAC was responsible for creating the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), a law enforcement group separate from the prosecutor general’s office that was tasked with handling the biggest corruption cases. It has investigatory powers but cannot indict suspects. Only when it passes its findings to prosecutors does a subject of its inquiry become part of a criminal case. The agency was established in 2014 at the behest of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) after its predecessor, the National Anti-Corruption Committee, was deemed a failure. Western governments funded NABU, which also enjoyed the backing of the FBI. Like all the Orwellian names of groups Soros had a part in, NABU acts independently in name only.
With the Obama DOJ’s launch of the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative, aimed at battling large-scale public corruption in foreign states, the State Department, DOJ, and FBI began outsourcing some of their own work to AntAC.
In February 2015, Viktor Shokin was appointed prosecutor general of Ukraine, and was soon scrutinized for helping the owner of the energy company Burisma. Shokin had helped owner Mykola Zlochevsky regain control of $23 million that was frozen by British authorities. Burisma was made famous by Hunter Biden’s involvement in the company, and Zlochevsky was the one who struck the deal to appoint Hunter to the company’s board of directors in 2014 at a reported salary of $83,333 per month.
AntAC’s stance on Shokin was made clear; it tweeted on December 2015 that “One of the major goals of #AntAC for 2016 is to force #Shokin to resign.”
Shokin attempted to begin a probe into Burisma that “included interrogations and other crime-investigation procedures into all members of the executive board, including Hunter Biden.”
This never materialized because Joe Biden (then Vice President) threatened to withhold a $1 billion loan to Ukraine unless Skokin was removed as prosecutor general. Biden even bragged about it on video to the Council on Foreign Relations in 2018, stating that when he attended a meeting with Ukraine’s president and prime minister, he said, “‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ Well, son of a bitch. He got fired.”
Biden insisted the U.S. wanted Shokin removed over corruption concerns shared by the European Union. But in tapes released by Ukrainian lawmaker Andrii Derkach, Biden and Poroshenko reveal that the Ukrainian president admitted to doing Biden’s bidding. The quid pro quo is proven.
“Despite the fact that (Shokin) didn’t have any corruption charges, we don’t have any information about him doing something wrong, I especially asked him…to resign.”
In another recording from March 22, 2016, the two allegedly discussed who would be appointed prosecutor general of Ukraine, and then who would be their eventual replacement. Former prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko was mentioned. The White House issued a press release confirming the pair talked again on this date.
At the end of the call, Biden said, “I’m a man of my word. And now that the new prosecutor general is in place, we’re ready to move forward to signing that new $1 billion loan guarantee.”
Derkach would later be punished for allegedly exposing Biden’s call with Poroshenko.
After the audio was made public, Poroshenko’s successor Volodymyr Zelensky called for an investigation into the recordings, and the U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Derkach, describing the audio as “unsupported information” part of a campaign to “discredit U.S. officials.” They also accused Derkach, a member of Ukraine’s parliament, of being a “Russian agent.”
The sanctions came less than a year after Derkach met with Rudy Giuliani in Kiev, which reports at the time said was to discuss possible misuse of U.S. tax dollars by Ukraine’s government.
“I can’t think of anything [Derkach] gave me that you could consider meddling in the election. Indicting [Steve] Bannon is a lot more meddling in the election than this. My best recollection is it was all information we had already. I know I kind of got bored during the deposition because I had already heard it.”
– Rudy Giuliani
“I can’t see how you can be accused of meddling in an election that is more than a year away,” Giuliani continued. “The only new piece of information he gave… is the report that $5.3 billion in foreign aid [to Ukraine] is unaccounted for, $3 billion of which is American money and a big portion of that went to nongovernmental organizations controlled by George Soros,” he continued.
As the 2016 presidential race began to intensify, Ukraine’s prosecutor general’s office began an investigation into AntAC about the alleged misuse of $2.2 million of funds. An inquiry was sent to former U.S. ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt. George Kent, the second-in-command at the embassy, responded to Deputy Prosecutor General Yuriy Stolyarchuk with a two-page letter stating that the U.S. had “no concerns about the use of our assistance funds.”
Kent pressured Stolyarchuk about AntAC in the letter, writing: “The investigation into the Anti-Corruption Action Center, based on the assistance they have received from us, is similarly misplaced.” That was written on April 4, 2016—less than a week after Shokin was removed.
A few months later, Yuriy Lutsenko was named prosecutor general and met with U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch. Lutsenko recalls being stunned when the ambassador gave him a list of people who shouldn’t be prosecuted. The list included a founder of AntAC, and two members of Ukrainian Parliament who supported AntAC’s anticorruption agenda (while benefitting from corruption themselves).
As John Solomon puts it, the implied message to Lutsenko was clear: “Don’t target AntAC in the middle of an American presidential election in which Soros was backing Hillary Clinton to succeed another Soros favorite, Barack Obama.”
So what was motivating George Kent and Ambassador Yovanovitch to influence investigations in Ukraine of all places?
The fact that Ukraine dealt with an organization created with the backing of the Obama administration, State Department, FBI, and George Soros. An investigation into AntAC could expose a whole chest of secrets—the least of which being that they’re not all concerned with corruption like they claim.
Memos uncovered by John Solomon from Soros’s Open Society Foundations before the 2016 election make that obvious. One advocates U.S. involvement in Ukraine and offers “behind the scenes advice and support to Ukrainian partner AntAC’s efforts to generate corruption litigation in Europe and the U.S. respecting state assets stolen by senior Ukrainian leaders.”
Another memo describes AntAC’s strategy of developing friendships in key government agencies to leverage within the countries Soros operates in.
“We have broadly recognized the importance of developing supportive constituencies in order to make headway in tightening the global web of anti-corruption accountability. We first conceived of this in terms of fostering and helping to build a political environment favorable to high-level anti-corruption cases.”
One such contact was Karen Greenaway, an FBI supervisor who was one of the lead agents in investigating Paul Manafort in Ukraine. She’s appeared at Soros-sponsored events and conferences before and joined AntAC’s supervisory board after retiring from the FBI. The FBI also separately confirmed her contacts with AntAC before she joined them, saying they were part of her “investigative work.”
One memo reportedly had a chart of Ukrainians that should be investigated, including people with ties to Paul Manafort.
While not mentioned by name, one of those mentioned is likely Dmitro Firtash, a Ukrainian billionaire with competing energy interests in Europe as Soros. Firtash previously beat civil charges alleging he had engaged in money laundering with Manafort.
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All of this pressure on Ukrainian prosecutors was happening in the spring of 2016 as Manafort joined the Trump campaign.
At this time, Fusion GPS was just starting to conduct opposition research on Trump, and the DNC’s Ukraine expert Alexandra Chalupa was searching for dirt on Manafort. Meanwhile, Soros-funded AntAC was looking to probe Manafort’s Ukraine associates, and the U.S. embassy was trying to stop any and all inquiries that risk derailing AntAC’s work. With AntAC having the potential to “uncover” more dirt on the prime contender to Hillary Clinton, the motivations become obvious.
Prosecutor General Lutsenko himself suggested that the embassy applied pressure because it didn’t want Americans to see who was being funded with our tax dollars. “At the time, Ms. Ambassador thought our interviews of the Ukrainian citizens, of the Ukrainian civil servants who were frequent visitors in the U.S. Embassy, could cast a shadow on that anti-corruption policy.”
Another Soros-funded group targeted Firtash in 2018.
The Open Society-backed Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint with the FEC alleging that Ukrainian businessman Igor Fruman and Russian-born businessman Lev Parnas created a shell company called Global Energy Producers, LLC to anonymously donate $325k to a pro-Trump super PAC. The investigation that followed uncovered a $1 million payment to Parnas’s wife from Firtash’s lawyer.
The hunt for any information that could possibly damage President Trump or anyone connected to him was now on.
A message from Project Veritas founder and CEO, James O’Keefe.
I awoke to the news that apartments and homes of Project Veritas journalists, or former journalists, had been raided by FBI agents. It appears the Southern District of New York now has journalists in their sights for the supposed “crime” of doing their jobs lawfully and honestly. Or at least, this journalist.
I had to think long and hard before making this statement. It’s a decision that only I can make. They don’t want me to defend myself and immediately tried to silence me. That’s why the cover letter for the Grand Jury Subpoena we received contains this language:
The Government hereby requests that you voluntarily refrain from disclosing the existence of the subpoena to any third party. While you are under no obligation to comply with our request, we are requesting you not to make any disclosure in order to preserve the confidentiality of the investigation and because disclosure of the existence of this investigation might interfere with and impede the investigation.
But while the Department of Justice requested us to not disclose the existence of the subpoena, something very unusual happened. Within an hour of one of our reporters’ homes being secretly raided by the FBI, The New York Times, who we are currently suing for defamation, contacted the Project Veritas reporter for comment. We do not know how The New York Times was aware of the execution of a search warrant at our reporter’s home, or the subject matter of the search warrant, as a Grand Jury investigation is secret.
The FBI took materials of current, and former, Veritas journalists despite the fact that our legal team previously contacted the Department of Justice and voluntarily conveyed unassailable facts that demonstrate Project Veritas’ lack of involvement in criminal activity and/or criminal intent. Like any reporter, we regularly deal with the receipt of source information and take steps to verify its authenticity, legality, and newsworthiness. Our efforts were the stuff of responsible, ethical, journalism and we are in no doubt that Project Veritas acted properly at each and every step.
However, it appears journalism itself may now be on trial.
Late last year, we were approached by tipsters claiming they had a copy of Ashley Biden’s diary. We had never met or heard of the tipsters. The tipsters indicated that the diary had been abandoned in a room in which Ms. Biden stayed at the time, and in which the tipsters stayed in temporarily after Ms. Biden departed the room. The tipsters indicated that the diary included explosive allegations against then-candidate, Joe Biden. The tipsters indicated that they were negotiating with a different media outlet for the payment of monies for the diary. The tipsters were represented by attorneys who handled the negotiations with Project Veritas.
We investigated the claims provided to us, as journalists do. We took steps to corroborate the authenticity of the diary. At the end of the day, we made the ethical decision that because, in part, we could not determine if the diary was real, if the diary in fact belonged to Ashley Biden, or if the contents of the diary occurred, we could not publish the diary and any part thereof. We attempted to return the diary to an attorney representing Ms. Biden, but that attorney refused to authenticate it. Project Veritas gave the diary to law enforcement to ensure it could be returned to its rightful owner. We never published it.
Now, Ms. Biden’s Father’s Department of Justice, specifically the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, appears to be investigating the situation, claiming the diary was stolen. We don’t know if it was, but it begs the question: in what world is the alleged theft of a diary investigated by the President’s FBI and his Department of Justice? A diary! This federal investigation smacks of politics. Project Veritas never threatened or engaged in any illegal conduct.
Should the Southern District of New York try to take away our First Amendment rights to uncover and publish newsworthy stories without government intimidation, be assured, Project Veritas will not back down.
Nothing stops at Project Veritas.
Let me be clear. Our mission is to serve the public’s right to know by illuminating, revealing and exposing information others wish to hide for the wrong reasons. To quote Lord Acton, we believe everything kept secret degenerates. We don’t mislead or conceal. We investigate facts and potential newsworthy information. Sometimes, as was the case here, after we investigate, we decide to not publish a news story. Project Veritas will run from nothing, and we will hide from nothing. We exist for the very purpose of discovering and revealing the truth, in hope to make the world a more transparent place.
Now, this is not the first time we have been attacked and it will not be the last. We know why. We’ve investigated powerful people, and, in many ways, we are the tip of the spear, but we never break the law. Our rule is to act as if there are 12 jurors on our shoulders all the time. The truth will vindicate us.
When the FBI and the Southern District of New York seize reporter’s notebooks, it is not just an attack on Project Veritas. It is an attack on every American and our sacred right to free speech and a free press. The First Amendment is first for a reason: it guarantees all the other rights that follow, because it’s about accountability. Without accountability, freedom itself is an illusion.
So, the great question is: Is this an indicator in the direction that America is going?
We’ve gone far beyond the point of partisan politics in this country. They ask us to focus on our divisions. They don’t ask us to focus on the things which unite us. What unites us is so much more powerful than what divides us.
The First Amendment doesn’t just matter to people on one side. It matters to people on all sides.
That is why I’m calling on all Americans, and especially all journalists, to stand with us for the right to free speech, the free press, and to send a message that the politics of fear will not prevail in the United States of America.
About Project Veritas
James O’Keefe established Project Veritas in 2010 as a non-profit journalism enterprise to continue his undercover reporting work. Today, Project Veritas investigates and exposes corruption, dishonesty, self-dealing, waste, fraud, and other misconduct in both public and private institutions to achieve a more ethical and transparent society and to engage in litigation to: protect, defend and expand human and civil rights secured by law, specifically First Amendment rights including promoting the free exchange of ideas in a digital world; combat and defeat censorship of any ideology; promote truthful reporting; and defend freedom of speech and association issues including the right to anonymity. O’Keefe serves as the CEO and Chairman of the Board so that he can continue to lead and teach his fellow journalists, as well as protect and nurture the Project Veritas culture.
Project Veritas is a registered 501(c)3 organization. Project Veritas does not advocate specific resolutions to the issues raised through its investigations.
Illegal immigrants who were separated from family members by U.S. border agents could get money from the government in a potential lawsuit settlement, the White House said Thursday.
Directly rebutting President Joe Biden’s comments a day prior, White House principal deputy press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters the reported payments could happen.
“If it saves taxpayer dollars and puts the disastrous history of the previous administration’s use of zero tolerance and family separation behind us, the president is perfectly comfortable with the Department of Justice settling with the individuals and families who are currently in litigation with the U.S. government,” she said during a briefing in Washington.
Biden, speaking on Nov. 3, told a reporter that reports his administration was mulling such payments were “garbage” and “it’s not true.”
“Four hundred and fifty thousand dollars per person. Is that what you’re saying?” Biden asked. “That’s not going to happen.”
That drew a response from the American Civil Liberties Union, whose lawyers are working on the case in question.
“President Biden may not have been fully briefed about the actions of his very own Justice Department as it carefully deliberated and considered the crimes committed against thousands of families separated from their children as an intentional governmental policy,” Anthony Romero, the group’s executive director, said in a statement.
Jean-Pierre said Biden was merely reacting to the reported figure of $450,000 per person.
“What he was reacting to was the dollar figure that was mentioned,” she said, adding that the Department of Justice “made clear to the plaintiffs that the reported figures are higher than anywhere that a settlement can land.”
President Joe Biden arrives to speak in Washington on Nov. 3, 2021. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)
She also said that the process of separating illegal immigrant family members was “cruel, inhuman, immoral” and blamed the Trump administration for carrying out the separations.
Reports indicated that the Biden administration was considering payments to the plaintiffs, who have filed multiple lawsuits after the separations. The total payout was said to potentially reach $1 billion, or even exceed that figure.
“So to recap: It was reported that the White House plans to pay $450,000 to illegal immigrants. Joe Biden denied it. And now, a day later, the White House staff comes out and says they DO in fact intend to pay settlements to illegal immigrants,” Mark Meadows, former chief of staff in the Trump administration, wrote on Twitter.
Ronald Mortensen, a retired U.S. Foreign Service Officer, wrote in a Center for Immigration Studies blog post that the White House “backtracked” from Biden’s original statement.
Many Republican members of Congress had condemned the potential payouts, which the Federation for American Immigration Reform noted were higher than the amounts paid to survivors of U.S. troops who die on active duty and individuals wrongly imprisoned.
Romero told news outlets that Biden’s comments did appear to have an impact.
“The president’s comments and congressional pushback do appear to have affected settlement negotiations, which were admittedly in flux,” he said.
The Department of Justice, he added, “communicated on Wednesday evening that the settlement numbers for separated families were higher than where the settlement could land” and that “parties continue to negotiate.”
A group of Republican senators wants President Joe Biden to drop his administration’s reported plan to pay more than $1 billion to illegal immigrants whose families were separated by federal immigration authorities under then-President Donald Trump.
The payments would be made by the federal government to settle litigation filed on behalf of hundreds of such illegal immigrants by the American Civil Liberties Union, according to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported on the proposal.
The proposed payments could be as high as $450,000 per individual, meaning a family of four could receive up to $1.8 million from U.S. taxpayers. Most of the affected families are reportedly made up of one adult and one child. Officials from the Department of Justice (DOJ), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) are involved in the legal negotiations.
The proposal has sparked a growing wave of protests in Congress and elsewhere, including from Republican Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and John Kennedy (R-La.), along with nine of their Senate GOP colleagues. who wrote a Nov. 1 letter to Biden.
“The government is now seeking to financially reward aliens who broke our laws. The previous administration already took action to ensure that DHS could maintain custody of family units apprehended along the border and charged with criminal improper entry, rather than separate the family and transfer the parents to criminal detention,” reads the letter, which was made public on Nov. 2.
“The government also already signed a settlement agreement in 2018 to address concerns about family separation. Yet the new agreement that DHS is considering would have the government pay out potentially more than $1 billion to illegal immigrants based on allegations that DHS intentionally caused them emotional harm.
“However, these illegal immigrants disregarded our immigration processes, cut in front of those seeking to legally enter our nation, and put children at risk of great personal injury or death by placing them in the hands of abusive smugglers.
“Not only would these settlements be breathtakingly unjust and unwise, but they reinforce the conditions that make it easy for the cartels to recruit more people to undertake the treacherous journey to our southwest border, and serve only to encourage more illegal immigration.”
Also signing the letter with Hawley and Kennedy were Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who is the ranking GOP member of the Senate Judiciary Committee; Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.); John Cornyn (R-Texas); Ted Cruz (R-Texas); Michael Lee (R-Utah); Ben Sasse (R-Neb.); Thom Tillis (R-N.C.); Tom Cotton (R-Ark.); and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.).
Not among the signers is Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), the top Republican on the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs. He told The Epoch Times on Nov. 3 that he supports “reunifying families who were wrongly separated and following due process to right any harm that was caused, but I do not support the administration’s reported proposal to direct federal bureaucrats to make lump sum payments of $450,000.”
“Americans are a kind and generous people who welcome a diverse array of immigrants from around the world,” the letter reads. “Our nation has been made stronger by the generations of legal immigrants that have contributed to our country and achieved the American Dream. But rewarding illegal immigration with financial payments runs counter to our laws and would only serve to encourage more illegal immigration.”
A White House spokesman referred a request for comment to the DOJ, which didn’t immediately respond.
The senators crafted the letter as the Biden administration continues to maintain what amounts to an open border with Mexico, as a record numbers of illegal immigrants cross into the United States in Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.
Biden reversed Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy that required border crossers to return south of the border until their applications for entry could be processed by federal immigration authorities. Under Biden, hundreds of thousands of such illegal entrants have been transported, many unannounced and under the cover of darkness by the federal government to points across the interior of the country.
Congressional Democrats have twice been turned back by the Senate Parliamentarian in their efforts to include new immigration laws that would effectively codify the changes Biden has made since taking office in January.
The Parliamentarian ruled the changes couldn’t be included in the President’s $3.5 trillion Build Back Better reconciliation spending plan because they aren’t primarily budget measures. That bill only needs 50 votes (along with the vice president’s tie-breaking vote) to be approved. Otherwise, the changes to immigration law would need 60 votes.
Earlier this week, the Democrats announced that they’re making a third attempt at including the immigration law changes with a “Plan C.” As The Epoch Times reported earlier this week, the Democrats’ new plan would tweak the law to allow illegal immigrants who came into the country after 1972 and before 2010 to be eligible for amnesty.
The power to award such amnesty to illegal immigrants who have become de facto residents is vested in Congress, but Congress hasn’t moved up the date to allow illegal immigrants to be eligible for a pathway to citizenship since President Richard Nixon was in the Oval Office in 1972.
A group of House Republicans are demanding answers from all 93 U.S. attorneys about what steps they have taken since the U.S. Department of Justice issued a memo directing them to potentially crack down on parental protests.
“We are continuing to investigate the troubling attempts by the Department of Justice and the White House to use the heavy hand of federal law enforcement to target concerned parents at local school board meetings and chill their protected First Amendment activity,” the Republicans said in a letter (pdf) sent on Monday to every U.S. attorney in all 50 states and territories.
The DOJ memo, which sparked much controversy since its Oct. 4 release, directs the FBI and U.S. Attorneys’ Offices to “convene meetings” with state and local governments to address an alleged “disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence” against teachers and school leaders.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garlandlater revealed at a congressional hearing that his department issued the memo after communicating with the White House about a letter from the National School Boards Association (NSBA). The NSBA letter characterized disruptions at school board meetings as “a form of domestic terrorism and hate crime,” and urged the Biden administration to invoke counter-terrorism laws to handle “angry mobs” of parents seeking to hold school officials accountable for teaching the Marxist-inspired critical race theory and for imposing COVID-19 restrictions on their children.
“Concerned parents voicing their strong opposition to controversial curricula at local schools are not domestic terrorists,” the Republicans said, adding that state and local authorities are already equipped with legal tools in case any parent actually crosses the line to commit a violent act.
Although the NSBA has apologized for the letter which the DOJ memo was based on, Garland has yet to rescind the order, meaning that his directives to U.S. Attorneys are still in effect, the Republicans said.
They further noted that during Garland’s testimony before the House, “he appeared to have no idea whether the U.S. Attorney meetings he ordered were actually taking place.”
Specifically, the Republicans demand that the U.S. attorneys provide a trove of information, including all documents and communications related to convening meetings in their respective judicial districts in response to Garland’s memo, and the names of all individual employees involved and organizations that were invited to or attended such meetings.
The U.S. attorneys will have until Nov. 15 to hand in those materials.
The letter was co-signed by 19 Republican members of Congress, including Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee.
Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton spoke out Tuesday after Attorney General Merrick Garland refused to meet his deadline to provide answers regarding a memo to the FBI to investigate parents.
Cotton made the comments on Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom” with host Bill Hemmer.
“We’re going to demand answers,” Cotton said.
“[Garland] responded in just four intervening days from the time the National School Board Association sent him this outrageous letter accusing parents expressing their opinions at school board meetings of being domestic terrorists.”
“We’re going to demand answers.” @SenTomCotton comments after AG Merrick Garland misses Senate Republicans’ deadline to provide evidence to support his memo to investigate “threats” by parents against school boards @BillHemmerpic.twitter.com/uoipCfx6qH
“That’s a land speed record for the government, Bill. As you can probably imagine, these bureaucrats can’t restock the coffee in the pantry in four days, much less issue a nationwide directive siccing the feds on parents who are concerned about their kids’ education,” he added.
Cotton called the situation an obvious act of collusion.
“What happened here is obvious. The National School Board Association in concert with political hacks and the Department of Justice and the White House colluded in advance to issue this letter,” Cotton said.
Should Merrick Garland resign?
“The Department of Justice knew it was coming, and then they sicced the feds on parents. That’s why Merrick Garland should be resigning in disgrace.”
Cotton revealed that the National School Boards Association’s letter has now been repudiated.
“All he’s ever cited is the school board letter and unspecified news reports. I suspect the news reports are the ones cited in the School Boards letter, which the School Board Association has now repudiated, and which used such discredited examples as the parent in Loudoun County, who was angry when his doctor had been raped in a bathroom by a boy dressed as a girl,” Cotton noted.
“The school board then covered it up, because they didn’t want it to interfere with their transgender policy and Pride month. And even more amazingly, they transferred the perpetrator to another school where he assaulted another girl, all because it would have interfered with their woke agenda.”
The news also follows a letter last week sent by a group of 19 Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee to Garland demanding he rescind the memorandum sent to the Federal Bureau of Investigation targeting parents at school board meetings.
The letter came after Garland appeared before the House Judiciary Committee last week.
“Your testimony before the Judiciary Committee last week concerning your October 4, 2021, memorandum targeting concerned parents at school board meetings was troubling,” the Republicans’ letter read.
#BREAKING: Judiciary Republicans demand Attorney General Garland withdraw school board memo.
“You acknowledged that you issued the unusual directive soon after reading about the thinly sourced letter sent by the National School Boards Association (NSBA) to President Biden and not because of any specific request from state or local law enforcement,” they added.
Way back in 1967, in that brief window of time between the media’s notice of the sexual revolution and its dawning awareness of second wave feminism, Hollywood made a movie called “A Guide for the Married Man,” which celebrated the joys of (male) adultery. Nowadays Tinseltown may practice it but doesn’t (usually) preach it; then it did both.
In one segment the mentor of a prospective adulterer answers the question of what to do if you are caught in the act by your wife by saying: “Deny, deny, deny.” There follows a vignette in which a man so caught does just that—until his partner in sin gets up, dresses and leaves.
“What woman?” says the husband.
“The one who just left,” says the wife.
“When?” says the husband.
“But, Charlie …” says the wife.
“What?”
“Aren’t you even ashamed of yourself?”
“Why?”
“Because of … Charlie?”
“What?”
“What would you like for dinner?”
Deplorable as the whole idea of such a movie is, there is a deep wisdom in this scene, which is this: when it ceases to be possible to catch someone in a lie, it also becomes impossible for that person to lie.
So long as the liar, like Charlie, holds the whip hand and therefore is powerful enough that it is impossible for anyone else to require him to admit to his lie, it’s not a lie.
The principle is basically the same as that expressed by the 16th century poet Sir John Harington:
“Treason doth never prosper; what’s the reason?
“For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.”
I tried to make a similar point, as you may remember, two weeks ago in this space, when I wrote that a lie that everybody knows to be a lie is no longer a lie but a kind of functional truth, since our knowledge that it’s a lie can reveal to us the truth.
It’s at that point, anyway, where those of us without the power to force an admission of lying can only shrug our shoulders and say of the liar, “Well, I guess he’s only expressing his truth.”
The examples I gave in that earlier column were taken from the collected works of President Joe Biden—most egregiously the obvious lies that the American evacuation of Afghanistan was “an extraordinary success” and that a $3.5 trillion spending bill would actually cost “zero.”
Of course, the power of the president to lie with impunity is not a constitutional one but is conferred upon him by the media, whose own greatest power is the power to ignore.
Applied to presidential lying, this power to ignore and therefore not to expose the lies means that, even if everybody knows they are lies, they can continue to function as truth—the president’s truth.
Despotisms have always functioned in this way, but usually through the despot’s direct control of the media. In America today the situation is somewhat different. The media’s power to ignore or to promote as truth the lies of the ostensible autocrat is assumed voluntarily and without constraint or fear of punishment.
Why should that be? I don’t know, but it suggests to me that it is not, under the Biden-style of despotism, the executive which is in control of the media but the media which is in control of the executive.
That would fit, too, with the sense that many of us have that, nasty as the old Joe Biden could be at times, the nastiness of his administration is no more all his own work than anything else that’s happened over the last nine months.
We caught a glimpse this week of how the process of collaboration between the media and Democrats in power to set the administration’s agenda works. The notorious letter from Attorney General Merrick Garland to the FBI, as reported in this space three weeks ago, setting up a task force to investigate as potential “domestic terrorism” any complaints by parents about left-wing curricular or other changes to public schools affecting their children turns out to have been not quite what it seemed at the time.
It was a result of collaboration between Garland and a few left wingers at the National School Boards Association, from which numerous state boards have since dissociated themselves, and was based at least in part on an incident in Loudoun County, Virginia, last June.
Then an aggrieved father, Scott Smith, was tackled by police and arrested at a school board meeting after complaining that his 15-year-old daughter had been raped in a girls’ restroom at Stone Bridge High School by a boy taking advantage of current left-wing orthodoxy to pose as a “transgender” girl.
On that occasion, Scott Ziegler, the Loudoun County school superintendent proclaimed that, “To my knowledge, we don’t have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms,” adding on the authority of Time magazine that “the predator transgender student or person simply does not exist.”
This was a lie on both counts. The Daily Wire reported two weeks ago that numerous allegations of sexual assault at the school had not been reported, as state law requires school authorities to do.
That, apparently was why “we don’t have any record” of such assaults. They didn’t trouble themselves to make one.
Then, on Monday, the “transgender” predator was convicted of assaulting not only Smith’s daughter but another girl at another school to which he had been transferred later as a potential embarrassment to Stone Bridge’s transgender restroom policy.
At this writing, Superintendent Ziegler still has his job. Deny, deny, deny certainly seems to have worked for him.
And, although the National Association of School Boards has since repudiated its own letter calling for investigation into “domestic terrorism,” Attorney General Garland still has his FBI task force to investigate it, as he informed the Senate Judiciary Committee on Oct. 27.
Joe Biden still has his job too, though now we have a better idea than we did nine months ago what that job is. It’s to cover up left-wing lies by playing the role of doddering old Uncle Joe who doesn’t know what he’s saying half the time anyway. You could call it type-casting.
The New Hampshire School Boards Association (NHSBA) announced Thursday that it has withdrawn from the national organization following the group’s efforts to target parents.
The National School Board Association (NSBA) recently sent a letter to the Biden administration’s Department of Justice that described the actions of parents protesting policies such as critical race theory or COVID-19 rules as the equivalence of “domestic terrorism.”
“This email is to inform you that NHSBA [the New Hampshire School Board Association] has decided to withdraw its membership from the National School Boards Association, effective immediately,” NHSBA Executive Director Barrett Christina wrote. “NSBA’s recent actions have made our continued membership untenable.
The NSBA wrote Sept. 29 (pdf), “America’s public schools and its education leaders are under an immediate threat.”
The letter added, “As these acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials have increased, the classification of these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”
Following the NSBA’s letter, Attorney General Merrick Garland sent a memorandum to the Federal Bureau of Investigations to direct investigators to address the “disturbing spike” in harassment involving school board members by parents.
The controversy led lawmakers in Washington to discuss the matter with Garland this week. Republicans on the Judiciary Committee blasted the attorney general after he failed to rescind the letter or apologize regarding the matter.
“Thank God you’re not on the Supreme Court,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) told Garland. “You should resign in disgrace.”
The NSBA has since apologized for its letter.
“On behalf of the NSBA, we regret and apologize for the letter. To be clear, the safety of school board members, other public school officials and educators, and students is our top priority, and there remains important work to be done on this issue,” the NSBA wrote last Friday.
“However, there was no justification for some of the language included in the letter. We should have had a better process in place to allow for some consultation on a communication of this significance,” the letter added.
Despite the apology, the damage has already had negative consequences nationwide.
In addition to New Hampshire, state school board associations in Ohio, Missouri, Louisiana, and Pennsylvania have already withdrawn from the NSBA.
Three additional states, Alabama, Florida, and Kentucky, have also announced they are considering a departure from the national organization.
It was just another suburban school board meeting like the thousands of others that regularly take place around the country.
A typical meeting with the school superintendent and some staff, the board members probably facing the room, perhaps a microphone for comments from the public, and federal agents and a helicopter circling overhead.
Wait — what?
While a lot of attention has been focused on the Loudoun County, Virginia, school district and its cover-up of a girl’s rape, shady things have been going on in neighboring Fairfax County, another upscale suburb of Washington, D.C.
Parents arriving at a Fairfax school board meeting last week were greeted by unmarked federal government vehicles and a helicopter shining a searchlight down on them, according to Stacy Langton, a mother of six who attended the meeting.
“This is something that is incredible in America and it’s, you know, ridiculously un-American,” Langton told Fox News.
“Honestly, I have paid a heavy price because of what I said at my school board meeting on Sept. 23 about the pornography and the pedophilia that I found in my son’s high school — at Fairfax High School.”
Langton said she has been harassed since participating in a “very peaceful, uneventful” protest last weekend at the Justice Department headquarters in Washington.
“Since the DOJ protest on Sunday … my family has been receiving daily threats,” she said. “So I have threats against my children by name, I have been followed in my car with my children in my car. … They know where I live, and I don’t know who’s putting somebody up to this, but it’s obviously meant to intimidate me.”
On Oct. 4, Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memo advising the FBI and U.S. attorneys to be aware of threats against school officials and school board members. He said the Justice Department is “steadfast in its commitment to protect all people in the United States from violence, threats of violence and other forms of intimidation and harassment.”
Merrick’s memo followed the now infamous letter to President Joe Biden from the National School Boards Association likening parental protests to “domestic terrorism and hate crimes.” The NSBA later rescinded and apologized for the letter.
After being grilled by Republican lawmakers during a Senate hearing on Wednesday, Garland reiterated his intention to mobilize federal agents against perceived threats to school boards.
Regarding the alleged threats against her, Langton could only speculate.
“It could be it’s the DOJ, it could be it’s [Terry McAuliffe’s] campaign people because I know this is suddenly all about the election here in the state of Virginia, it could be the school board, it could be the LGBTQ community. I know there are a lot of people who are very unhappy about what I said at the school board meeting.
“I don’t know why people have a problem with what I said because I don’t know who is in favor of pornography in their children’s school. This isn’t a political issue, and even the liberals shouldn’t be happy that there’s porn in the schools.
“So I’m not getting a lot of sleep right now. Nobody’s sleeping in my house because we can’t be sure that we’re safe.”
Langton speaks quite articulately, but one correction might be offered.
“General Garland, you have weaponized the FBI and the Department of Justice. Your U.S. attorneys are now collecting and cataloging all the ways that they might prosecute parents … because they want to be involved in their children’s education.”
That’s how Sen. Josh Hawley challenged Attorney General Merrick Garland on Wednesday as Garland testified before a Senate committee regarding the Justice Department’s interest in parents protesting against school boards.
“It’s wrong,” Hawley said. “It is unprecedented, to my knowledge, in the history of this country, and I call on you to resign.”
There may be headaches around the country today for the people who repeatedly facepalmed during Garland’s testimony.
Hawley zeroed in on Garland in front of a large photograph of police arresting Scott Smith, the angry father whose daughter was sexually assaulted in a school restroom in Loudoun County, Virginia.
The Republican senator grilled Garland on a letter from the U.S. attorney for Montana that he said called for the prosecution of parents speaking out against school boards.
The letter followed an Oct. 4 memo from Garland calling upon federal law enforcement officials to develop plans to respond to “threats against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff.” That memo had come days after the National School Boards Association sent a letter to President Joe Biden comparing school board protesters to domestic terrorists.
“Now, you testified last week before the House that you didn’t know anything about [the Smith] case,” Hawley said.
“I find that extraordinary because the [NSBA] letter that you put so much weight on — the letter that’s now been retracted — it cites this case. … There’s a news article cited in the letter. It’s discussed in the letter, but you testified you just couldn’t remember it.”
Do you think Garland should resign?
Hawley had Garland backed into a corner. Either he hadn’t done his due diligence before signing off on the Oct. 4 memo, or he had lied to Congress about being unaware of the Loudoun County incident.
“Maybe this will refresh your memory,” Hawley continued. “Do you think people like Scott Smith — do you think parents who show up to complain about their children being assaulted ought to be treated like this man right here?” Hawley asked, pointing to the picture of Smith being pinned to the floor by police.
Garland countered by saying that parents who show up at school board meetings are protected by the First Amendment.
“Do you think that they ought to be prosecuted in the different ways that your U.S. attorneys are identifying?” Hawley shot back.
Garland answered, “If what they’re doing is complaining about what the school board is doing — policies, curriculum, anything else that they want to — as long as they’re not committing threats of violence, then they should not be prosecuted, and they can’t be.”
But Hawley said some of his Democratic colleagues at the hearing had repeatedly compared parents protesting at school board meetings to “criminal rioters,” a charge Garland denied.
“Oh, really?” Hawley replied, picking up a piece of paper and apparently reading a quote from it. “‘These people are just like the folks who came here on Jan. 6 and [were involved in] the riot at the Capitol’?”
Garland, perhaps suddenly recalling comments by Democrats, replied, “I don’t think that they were referring to the picture that you’re showing there”
“Well, I certainly would hope not. They were referring to parents who go to school board meetings. Mr. Smith is a parent who went to a school board meeting.
“I’ll leave it at this. General Garland, you have weaponized the FBI and the Department of Justice. Your U.S. attorneys are now collecting and cataloging all the ways that they might prosecute parents like Mr. Smith because they want to be involved in their children’s education and they want to have a say in their elected officials.
“It’s wrong. It is unprecedented, to my knowledge, in the history of this country, and I call on you to resign.”
Despite challenges from Hawley and other Republicans, Garland said Wednesday that he will continue to mobilize federal officials against threats to school boards, according to U.S. News & World Report.
“True threats of violence are not protected by the First Amendment. Those are the things we are worried about here. Those are the only things we are worried about here,” Garland said.
“We are not investigating peaceful protests or parent involvement in school board meetings. There is no precedent for doing that and we would never do that. We are only concerned about violence and threats of violence against school administrators, teachers, staff.”
Of course, violence is increasingly becoming whatever leftists say it is (as in the “silence is violence” line from Black Lives Matter).
Hawley is right — Garland should resign.
And here’s a suggestion: Think about sending the video of Hawley grilling Garland to your representative or senator as a primer on what many of us expect of those representing us in Congress.
Denouncing efforts by the National School Boards Association to demonize parents who demand a say in the education of their children, the Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday announced they will investigate potential collusion between the Biden administration and the National School Boards Association.
A rising tide of parental anger has been building across America as schools boards have jammed mask mandates, critical race theory, transgender activism and assorted other far-left extremist indoctrination tactics down the throats of children.
In response to defiant parents refusing to be pushed around any longer, Attorney General Merrick Garland earlier this month issued a memo saying that the Justice Department will now intervene on the side of school boards against parents.
“As these acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials have increased, the classification of these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes,” the group wrote in a letter.
The school boards association has since issued an apology for the reference to domestic terrorism, but not the general tenor of its attack on parents.
Is the Biden White House anti-parent?
Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee sent a scathing letter to the National School Boards Association on Wednesday announcing the launch of their investigation into the organization’s war on parents in partnership with the White House.
“We are investigating the troubling attempts by the Department of Justice and the White House to use the heavy hand of federal law enforcement to target concerned parents at local school board meetings and chill their protected First Amendment activity,” the letter thundered.
Noting that the group’s letter denouncing parents produced the knee-jerk reaction of Garland’s memo, the letter added that Garland told the House panel that the letter’s wild claims were the basis of his anti-parent memo.
Merrick Garland tells @ChuckGrassley he will not dissolve school board task force even though the National School Boards Association apologized for the “domestic terrorism” letter that seemingly prompted Garland to create the task force
“The Biden Administration seemingly relied upon the NSBA letter — which it coordinated in advance with the NSBA — as justification to unleash the full weight of the federal law enforcement apparatus upon America’s parents,” the letter read.
“Parents have an undisputed right to direct the upbringing and education of their children, including expressing concerns about the inclusion of controversial curricula in their child’s education,” the House Republicans wrote, noting that the school boards association appears not to recognize that.
“Unsurprisingly, the NSBA’s September 29 letter to President Biden never once mentioned ‘parents’ or parents’ role in their children’s education — although its subsequent apology memorandum purported to value the ‘voices of parents.’ Concerned parents are absolutely not domestic terrorists and, to the extent actual threats exist, local law enforcement — and not the FBI — are the appropriate authorities to address those situations,” the letter read.
“Parents cannot tolerate this collusion between the NSBA and the Biden Administration to construct a justification for invoking federal law enforcement to intimidate and silence parents using their Constitutional rights to advocate for their child’s future.”
The letter called for a release of all the documents from the group and the Biden administration that were germane to its demand that parents be restrained from publicly advocating for their children.
The letter also asked whether, in light of its new-found claim that it values parents, “the NSBA will urge Attorney General Garland to withdraw or rescind his October 4 memorandum.”
The letter was signed by Republican Reps. Jim Jordan, of Ohio; Steve Chabot of Ohio; Louie Gohmert of Texas; Darrell Issa of California; Ken Buck of Colorado; Matt Gaetz of Florida; Mike Johnson of Louisiana; Andy Biggs of Arizona; Tom McClintock of California; Greg Steube of Florida; Tom Tiffany of Wisconsin; Thomas Massie of Kentucky; Chip Roy of Texas; Dan Bishop of North Carolina; Michelle Fischbach of Minnesota; Victoria Spartz of Indiana; Scott L. Fitzgerald of Wisconsin; Cliff Bentz of Oregon and Burgess Owens of Utah.
Last week, Eugene Huelsman was arrested for making death threats to a sitting U.S. Congressman. Now, his list of reported former employers is putting his name in the headlines once again.
According to the U.K. Daily Mail, Huelsman is an Emmy-nominated television cameraman. Some of his notable work includes time on “Late Night with Conan O’Brien” and “The Ellen DeGeneres Show.”
Perhaps more importantly, Huelsman worked for news networks including NBC, CNN and ABC, according to Fox News report. All of those networks lean considerably to the political left in their coverage.
Politico reported that the indictment accuses Huelsman of making death threats to Florida Republican Rep. Matt Gaetz and his family. Prosecutors alleged Huelsman called the office of someone identified as “M.G.” on Jan. 9, and Gaetz told Politico that he was the person who received those alleged threats.
“Tell [M.G.] to watch his back, tell him to watch his children,” Huelsman said, according to the indictment. “I’m coming for him … I’m gonna f***ing kill him… I’m gonna put a bullet in you and I’m gonna put a bullet in one of your f***ing kids too.”
On Tuesday, Gaetz’s official Twitter account posted a video of Fox News’ Kevin Corke describing Huelsman’s background during an appearance on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”
“Eugene ‘Gene’ Huelsman, a longtime camera operator for CNN, ABC, NBC, and others, has been ARRESTED for threatening to kill Matt Gaetz and his family,” the tweet said. “Another man who recently threatened Rep. Gaetz is still free after the DOJ blocked USCP’s recommendation for arrest.”
BREAKING: Eugene “Gene” Huelsman, a longtime camera operator for CNN, ABC, NBC, and others, has been ARRESTED for threatening to kill Matt Gaetz and his family.
Another man who recently threatened Rep. Gaetz is still free after the DOJ blocked USCP’s recommendation for arrest. pic.twitter.com/JbIe3LJAY5
The second sentence of that tweet alludes to an allegation Gaetz made on the House floor on Oct. 20, Politico reported.
“I think someone may be trying to kill me and if they are successful I would like my constituents and my family to know who stopped their arrest,” Gaetz said.
He then alleged that a person who threatened him on Twitter had recently traveled to Washington, D.C., but he said the Justice Department ignored a recommendation from the Capitol Police to arrest the person.
BREAKING: A man traveled across the country with the explicit goal of killing me in Washington, D.C.
“If my name weren’t Gaetz, if it were Omar or Tlaib, you bet this person would have been arrested because that’s what the Capitol Police recommended,” he said. “But the Department of Justice doesn’t seem to care so much when it’s Republicans.”
While Gaetz has certainly been a controversial figure during his time in office, he is absolutely correct in this case. If these threats had been made against a Democratic member of Congress, the Justice Department and the establishment media would have responded much differently.
According to Politico, an indictment was originally issued against Huelsman in May, but it was not until last week that the Department of Justice unsealed it, Gaetz said.
One cannot help but imagine the establishment media coverage if a former Fox News employee made the same threat against a Democrat.
While there is no way to prove it for a fact, something tells me the headlines would have been much different.
A group of 19 Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee sent a letter to Biden administration Attorney General Merrick Garland on Monday to demand that he rescind a communication targeting parents at school board meetings.
The letter came after Garland appeared before the House Judiciary Committee last week following his Oct. 4 message which called out concerned parents.
The controversial memorandum was sent to the Federal Bureau of Investigations after the National School Boards Association sent a letter to President Joe Biden criticizing vocal parents as “domestic terrorists.”
“Your testimony before the Judiciary Committee last week concerning your October 4, 2021, memorandum targeting concerned parents at school board meetings was troubling,” the letter read.
#BREAKING: Judiciary Republicans demand Attorney General Garland withdraw school board memo.
“You acknowledged that you issued the unusual directive soon after reading about the thinly sourced letter sent by the National School Boards Association (NSBA) to President Biden and not because of any specific request from state or local law enforcement,” it added.
Despite Garland’s testimony, the letter concluded, the attorney general “sidestepped” the effect of his memorandum.
“During your testimony, you sidestepped the obvious effect of your ill-conceived memorandum and the chilling effect that invoking the full weight of the federal law enforcement apparatus would have on parents’ protected First Amendment speech,” the letter said.
Should Merrick Garland resign as attorney general?
The committee’s letter upheld the rights of parents to direct the education of their children, including involvement at school board meetings.
The response also clarified that local law enforcement is the appropriate group to respond to any threats or violence rather than the FBI.
“Parents have an undisputed right to direct the upbringing and education of their children, especially as school boards attempt to install controversial curricula. Local law enforcement — and not the FBI — are the appropriate authorities to address any local threats or violence,” the House members wrote.
GOP Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio accused the Justice Department of creating a “snitch line” to tell on parents during the committee’s hearing with Garland last week.
“When the attorney general, the United States sets up a snitch line on parents, Americans aren’t going to tolerate it,” Jordan said.
“I think they’re gonna stand up to this accelerated march to communism that we now see America is going to fight the good fight, they’re going to finish the course, they’re going to keep the faith, because Americans value freedom,” he added.
The NSBA apologized on Friday regarding its September letter.
“On behalf of the NSBA, we regret and apologize for the letter. To be clear, the safety of school board members, other public school officials and educators, and students is our top priority, and there remains important work to be done on this issue,” the NSBA wrote Friday.
“However, there was no justification for some of the language included in the letter. We should have had a better process in place to allow for some consultation on a communication of this significance,” the letter added.
In late September, conservative parents and voters discovered what the NSBA is. It wasn’t a pleasant introduction:
The National School Boards Association penned a letter to President Joe Biden in which the educators group asked “for federal law enforcement and other assistance to deal with the growing number of threats of violence and acts of intimidation occurring across the nation.”
This sounds pretty dire until you realize the letter was talking, in large part, about parents revolting at school board meetings over radical curriculums that included elements of critical race theory and overreaches such as mask mandates.
In the letter, the NSBA accused parents of “spreading misinformation” and asserted, without evidence, that “extremist hate organizations” were “inciting chaos” at contentious school board meetings.
And then the kicker: This activity “could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”
In a matter of days, Attorney General Merrick Garland snapped to attention and sent out a memorandum promising the FBI would hold meetings with school officials nationwide to “facilitate the discussion of strategies for addressing threats against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff, and will open dedicated lines of communication for threat reporting, assessment, and response.”Is public education getting too woke?Yes No Completing this poll entitles you to The Western Journal news updates free of charge. You may opt out at anytime. You also agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
This quickly soured on both ends — particularly the NSBA’s assertion that parent activists were involved in “domestic terrorism.” Things got worse on Thursday when the Washington Free Beacon reported that emails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request show the NSBA’s president and CEO collaborated with the White House before the letter was sent — and that it was released without the approval of the NSBA’s board.
“On behalf of the NSBA, we regret and apologize for the letter. To be clear, the safety of school board members, other public school officials and educators, and students is our top priority, and there remains important work to be done on this issue,” the letter stated.
“We apologize also for the strain and stress this situation has caused you and your organizations.”
Breaking: In the wake of yesterday’s @FreeBeacon report, National School Board Association announces “we regret and apologize for the letter” to Biden admin characterizing concerned parents as potentially domestic terrorists pic.twitter.com/3RBufvWqAN
“As we’ve reiterated since the letter was sent, we deeply value not only the work of local school boards that make important contributions within our communities, but also the voices of parents, who should and must continue to be heard when it comes to decisions about their children’s education, health, and safety,” the letter continued.
And, of course, what belated apology would be complete without this line?: “We are going to do better going forward.”
“Doing better” is apparently defined as “a formal review of our processes and procedures,” as well as “specific improvements” regarding “coordination and consultation among our staff, and our members across the country.”
This will apparently stop the NSBA from implying parents who love their children are engaged in “domestic terrorism.” It’s also worth noting that the memorandum does not address the specific inflammatory language and positions of the group’s Sept. 29 letter to the White House, nor does it discuss the prior coordination with the White House.
Also unaddressed is the questions Garland faced over the letter — and the Department of Justice’s subsequent memorandum, issued just days after the NSBA’s missive — during his testimony before the House Judiciary Committee last week.
“Three weeks ago, the National School Board Association writes President Biden asking him to involve the FBI in local school board matters. Five days later, the attorney general of the United States does just that, does exactly what a political organization asks to be done,” Ohio GOP Rep. Jim Jordan said.
“Republicans on this committee have sent the attorney general 13 letters in the last six months,” he added. “Eight of the letters, we’ve got nothing — they just gave us the finger.” Other letters took weeks to merit a response, Jordan said. But it was merely days before Garland promised the NSBA “open dedicated lines of communication for threat reporting.”
“A snitch line on parents started five days after a left-wing political organization asked for it,” Jordan said. “If that’s not political, I don’t know what is.
BREAKING: Ohio Rep. @Jim_Jordan let loose on Attorney General Merrick Garland at Thursday’s hearing: “Folks all around the country, they tell me, for the first time they are afraid of their government” pic.twitter.com/9aWjNCnohU
None of this was mentioned in the NSBA’s apology. Just a sanitized “mistakes were made“-ish retraction of an inflammatory letter which, by all appearances, spurred the Department of Justice and the FBI to treat American parents as if they were domestic terrorist threats for caring about their children’s education.
It certainly took long enough. And after all that, the apology was neither public nor specific. Meanwhile, it appears the FBI still remains mobilized against the chimerical threat the NSBA railed against.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced Tuesday a sweeping new policy prohibiting the use of chokeholds by federal law enforcement agents. The new policy nearly bans the use of chokeholds, except in rare circumstances and limits the circumstances on so-called “No-Knock” entries or warrants.
Attorney General Merrick B. Garland said ,”The new policies were intended to improve law enforcement safety and accountability. Build trust and confidence between law enforcement and the public we serve is central to our mission at the Justice Department.”
The use of chokeholds and ‘no knock warrants, when law enforcement enters a premises unannounced, have featured in several recent cases in the United States involving the deaths of Black men and women at the hands of police. Officers actually now only use chokeholds and carotid restraints when deadly force is authorized.
Eric Garner, a Black man, died in New York in 2014 after being put in a prohibited chokehold by police seeking to arrest him for illegally selling cigarettes.
Another African-American, George Floyd, died in May 2020 when a Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, knelt on his neck for nearly 10 minutes, a case which sparked protests against racial injustice and police brutality across the United States.
And a Black woman, Breonna Taylor, was killed by police in Louisville, Kentucky, in march 2020 in a botched raid on her apartment.
Directly following Chauvin’s conviction, Garland announced a DOJ investigation into policing practices of the Minnesota police department. He said the investigation includes examining discriminatory policing forces used by local authorities.
“The limitations implemented today on the use of ‘chokeholds and carotid restraints’ and ‘No-Knock’ warrants, combined with our recent expansion of body-worn cameras to DOJ’s federal agents, are among the important steps the department is taking to improve law enforcement safety and accountability,” Garland said.
Garland added in a statement, “No-Knock entries will only be allowed in situations where an agent has reasonable grounds to believe that knocking and announcing the agent’s presence would create an imminent threat of physical violence to the agent and/or person.”
Representative Matt Gaetz is no stranger to controversy, but the latest targeted attack of which he claims to be the victim is beyond the pale.
Gaetz, a staunch ally of President Donald Trump, has denounced allegations that he has been involved in corruption and sex trafficking as a partisan smear campaign.
Indeed, during the Trump era, weaponized allegations of wrongdoing became something of an institution — yet, according to Gaetz, one angry leftist may be geared up to go much, much farther than simply stirring up fodder for progressive Twitter.
The Florida congressman said Wednesday that someone is now trying to kill him and, what’s more, the Department of Justice has refused to do anything about it.
Representative Gaetz made the claims in a speech on the floor of Congress this week, revealing that he’d been told by someone on Twitter that they’d been hired as a hit man to take him out.
BREAKING: A man traveled across the country with the explicit goal of killing me in Washington, D.C.
“I think someone may be trying to kill me. If they are successful, I would like my constituents and my family to know who stopped their arrest,” Gaetz declared in his shocking speech on Wednesday.
“Madam Speaker, on October 8, 2021, a Twitter handle, styled, CIA Bob is at your door, tweeted to @RepMattGaetz, ‘Looky here, pal. I lived in Portland. Portland has ordered a hit on you. I accepted the contract. Have a good day,’” he explained.
Do you believe Gaetz’s story?
“Following this tweet, this individual traveled to Washington, D.C., and the Capitol Police recommended his arrest,” the congressman continued.
Gaetz explained that the investigations and threat assessment section of the Protective Services Bureau shared with him that the Capitol Police recommended the arrest of the individual who had sent him the threatening private message, but that the Department of Justice “refused to do so.”
He derided this as “yet another example of the Department of Justice having a double standard.”
“If my name weren’t Gaetz, if it were Omar or Tlaib, you bet this person would have been arrested because that’s what the Capitol Police recommended,” he charged. “But the Department of Justice doesn’t seem to care so much when it’s Republicans.”
The Department of Justice certainly has time to ensure that angry parents be probed as domestic terrorists, but not to look into overt death threats made against a sitting member of the House of Representatives?
Here’s the thing — it is a sad reality of today’s world that lightning-rod politicians like Representatives Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Matt Gaetz, and Marjorie Taylor Greene do get death threats.
And while these figures may be some of the most emphatic voices in a political landscape that is increasingly polarizing, they are, nonetheless, elected representatives and living, breathing human beings who should be able, at the very least, to be able to walk the streets and go to work on Capitol Hill without fearing for their lives. (There’s an Amendment for that, in fact, as Representative Lauren Boebert knows very well).
The members of the January 6 Commission have given the American public the impression that protecting the citadel of democracy and all its inhabitants should not be a partisan issue, and for all their glaringly political posturing, they’re certainly right on this count.
They’ve practically canonized the Capitol Hill police officer who shot and killed protester Ashli Babbit on that fateful day. Yet, if what Gaetz is saying is true, how is it that the word of the Capitol Police isn’t reason enough to arrest a man who threatened a sitting congressman?
Protecting the lives of the people elected to Congress should be a top priority for the Department of Justice, regardless of who is in the White House or which party’s congressman is threatened.
What’s really sad here is that it’s not difficult at all to believe that Gaetz really has been the victim of Washington D.C.’s notorious two-tiered justice system.
Let’s just pray he doesn’t also become the victim of the deranged leftist the Biden Justice Department allegedly refused to arrest.
Sometimes, keeping sane while following politics involves wildly unwarranted optimism.
You’ve got to be a bit like the condemned criminals at the end of “Monty Python’s Life of Brian,” singing “Always Look on the Bright Side of Life” as they’re being executed.
Take Attorney General Merrick Garland, a man far more concerned with attacking our Second Amendment rights, law enforcement officers and parents protesting woke school boards trying to implement critical race theory-based curricula than he is with America’s skyrocketing violent crime rate or crisis at the border.
Sure, he’s a disaster — and a dangerous one at that.
But at least he’s not on the Supreme Court.
Imagine if a man who treats parents as if they were a domestic terror threat had a lifetime appointment to the high court, as former President Barack Obama thought he should. Remember how he was supposed to be a “moderate” pick, a compromise so that the Republicans in control of the Senate would confirm him? Yeah, not so much.
That’s how I kept calm Thursday when Garland appeared before the House Judiciary Committee and the Democratic committee chairman, Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York, in his opening statement, began by praising Garland and his Department of Justice — at least in comparison to what he inherited.
“You have assumed this enormous responsibility at a crossroads in our nation’s history,” Nadler said in his opening statement, according to a transcript.
“For four years, the democratic institutions you have sworn to protect — first, as a judge, and now, as attorney general — were deeply undermined by the former president and his political enablers. During that time, the Trump administration leveraged the department to protect the president and his friends, and to punish his enemies, both real and imagined.”
Garland, to judge by Nadler’s opening remarks, was some kind of admixture of Cincinnatus, Louis Brandeis and Eliot Ness, a man given the unenviable task of cleaning house after Trump and his poker buddies conspired to blow American democracy sky high.
Now, to hear the chairman tell it, there’s a Proud Boy or an Oath Keeper lurking behind every corner thanks to the former president — maybe even at your local school board meeting! — and it’ll take this gentle apolitical giant named Merrick Garland to clean things up.
This preposterous framing of the current political moment was impressive even by the standards of Nadler, one of the District of Columbia’s great horse-manure artists. Unfortunately for him, the next speaker was GOP Rep. Jim Jordan, a man of considerable caffeination who wasn’t about to let a fiction like that go unchallenged.
“The chairman just said the Trump DOJ was political and went after their opponents. Are you kidding me?’ Jordan began. “Three weeks ago, the National School Board Association writes President Biden asking him to involve the FBI in local school board matters. Five days later, the attorney general of the United States does just that, does exactly what a political organization asks to be done.”
Jordan was referring to an Oct. 4 memo from the Department of Justice in which Garland asserted “there has been a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff who participate in the vital work of running our nation’s schools.”
“The Department takes these incidents seriously and is committed to using its authority and resources to discourage these threats, identify them when they occur, and prosecute them when appropriate,” the memorandum continued, adding the FBI would “open dedicated lines of communication for threat reporting, assessment, and response.”
“Republicans on this committee have sent the attorney general 13 letters in the last six months,” Jordan said. “Eight of the letters, we’ve got nothing — they just gave us the finger.” Other letters took weeks for a response, he said.
And yet, the congressman noted, it took the NSBA “five days” to get exactly what they wanted — between the letter to Biden to Garland’s memorandum, which included a promise of “open dedicated lines of communication for threat reporting.”
“A snitch line on parents started five days after a left-wing political organization asked for it,” Jordan said. “If that’s not political, I don’t know what is.
Is Merrick Garland weaponizing the FBI?
“Where’s the dedicated lines of communication with local leaders regarding our southern border — something that frankly is a federal matter? Where’s the dedicated lines of communication on violent crime in our cities?
“Nope, can’t do that, the Biden Justice Department is going to go after parents who object to some racist, hate-America curriculum.”
BREAKING: Ohio Rep. @Jim_Jordan let loose on Attorney General Merrick Garland at Thursday’s hearing: “Folks all around the country, they tell me, for the first time they are afraid of their government” pic.twitter.com/9aWjNCnohU
According to the Daily Mail, Garland said he was focused merely on “violence or threats of violence,” not on treating activist parents as domestic terrorists.
“I want to be as clear as I can be: This is not about what happens inside school board meetings. This is only about threats of violence,” the attorney general said.
Threats of violence, however, are already matters under law enforcement purview. The FBI doesn’t need a memorandum from the attorney general to focus on them, nor does it need dedicated lines of communication.
When this attention happens to align felicitously with opposition to a top-line liberal agenda item — the radical remaking of American education, no matter what parents might think of it — it’s not difficult to deduce where the focus is coming from.
As for the effect the NSBA’s letter had, Garland said he first learned about it by watching the news, Fox News reported. However, he conceded that “was brought to our attention” and that the White House had discussed it with the DOJ.
If this were about threats of violence, that’s what police or, in certain cases, federal law enforcement officers are for.
Garland’s memo wasn’t about that, however.
It was a notice that the FBI was being mobilized against parents who continue to protest school boards that have lurched to the left and demand zero accountability. If the bureau didn’t do it at the behest of a left-wing educators organization, the timing sure seems fortuitous.
And, despite Jerrold Nadler’s best efforts to portray Garland as being as neutral as white paint in a living room, he’s a political operative who’s weaponized the DOJ at the behest of the Biden administration and the Democrats.
But at least Garland isn’t on the Supreme Court.
Sing along with me, folks: “When you’re chewing on life’s gristle / Don’t grumble, give a whistle / And this’ll help things turn out for the best / And always look on the bright side of life …”
GOP Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio did not allow House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler’s claim to go unchallenged that the Justice Department became a lawless, political agency due to former President Donald Trump, asking, “Are you kidding me?”
“For four years, the democratic institutions that you have sworn to protect, first as a judge, now as attorney general, were deeply undermined by the former president and his political enablers,” Nadler told Attorney General Merrick Garland prior to the top federal law enforcement officer’s testimony before the Judiciary Committee on Thursday.
“During that time, the Trump administration leveraged the department to protect the president and his friends and to punish his enemies, both real and imagined,” the New York Democrat said.
Nadler accused Trump of summoning the nation’s law enforcement officers following November’s election and demanding “they use the full power of the federal government to install him for another term.”
The Democrat told Garland his task is “unenviable … because you must build back everything [the Department of Justice] lost under the last administration. Its self-confidence, its reputation in the eyes of the American people and an institutional respect for our Constitution and the rule of law.”
Jordan, the ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, responded to Nadler’s opening statement by saying, “The chairman just said the Trump DOJ was political and went after their opponents. Are you kidding me?”
First, the congressman argued that Garland is overseeing a politically driven DOJ, pointing to a memorandum the attorney general put out earlier this month regarding “threats” against school officials from parents who are concerned about what their children are being taught.
“Three weeks ago the National School Board Administration writes President Biden asking him to involve the FBI in local school board matters,” Jordan said. “Five days later, the attorney general of the United States does just that. Does exactly what a political organization asked to be done.”
Do you think the DOJ is political under Biden?
Jordan contrasted that rapid movement by the attorney general with the slow response to 13 letters he and his congressional colleagues have sent to the DOJ, for which they sometimes wait weeks or months.
“Eight of the letters, we’ve got nothing,” the congressman said. “They just gave us the finger and said, ‘We’re not going to get back to you.’”
But what Jordan called a “snitch line” to report unruly parents was set up “five days after a left-wing political organization asked for it.”
“Think about this, the same FBI that Mr. Garland is directing to open dedicated lines of communication for reporting on parents just a few years ago spied on four American citizens associated with President Trump’s campaign,” the representative said.
“The Clinton campaign hired Perkins Coie, who hired Fusion GPS, who hired Christophe Steele who put a bunch of garbage together, gave it to the FBI. They used that as the basis to open up an investigation into a presidential campaign,” Jordan continued.
He further noted that a federal grand jury last month indicted Michael A. Sussmann, an attorney who worked at Perkins Coie, for allegedly passing false information to then-FBI general counsel Jim Baker alleging covert communications between the Trump campaign and Russians.
Jordan also pointed out, “A few weeks ago, the [inspector general] at the Department of Justice released a report that found that the FBI made over 200 errors, omissions and lies in just 29 randomly selected FISA applications.”
Last month, USA Today reported that the IG “faulted the FBI for ‘widespread’ errors in its applications for surveillance authority, concluding that the bureau failed to provide supporting documentation for sensitive wiretap requests.”
“Building on a 2019 examination of the FBI’s surveillance of a former Trump aide [Carter Page], Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz found that the bureau did not include adequate support for 183 surveillance applications between 2015 and 2020 following a review of more than 7,000 such requests,” it said.
Multiple FBI and DOJ officials prominently discussed in text messages of those serving in the FBI’s Russia probe of the Trump campaign have been forced out or left the agencies, Politico reported.
Those include former FBI Director James Comey, whom Trump fired; former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe; Comey’s chief of staff, James Rybicki; Baker; FBI agent Peter Strzok; FBI lawyer Lisa Page; and Bruce Ohr, who was associate deputy attorney general.
Bringing his remarks back to the present, Jordan contended that citizens’ constitutional rights have been under assault by the government and that “Americans are afraid.”
“They tell me for the first time, they fear their government,” he said. “And frankly I think it’s obvious why. Every single liberty we enjoy under the First Amendment has been assaulted over the last year.”
However, Jordan argued Garland’s memo was a turning point.
“I don’t think the good people of this great country are going to cower and hide. I think your memo, Mr. Attorney General, was the last straw,” he said. “I think it was the catalyst for a great awakening that is just getting started.”
Jordan concluded, “Americans are pushing back because Americans value freedom.”
A House Judiciary Committee hearing with Attorney General Merrick Garland got testy when the top Republican and Democrat got into a heated exchange.
It happened on Thursday when Republican Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan started when he objected to the Biden Administration’s plan to have the IRS monitor the bank accounts of Americans, and then he told committee chair, New York Rep. Jerry Nadler that he had a video to present.
But Democrat Pennsylvania Rep. Madeleine Dean objected to the video because Republicans did not follow the “48 hour rule” which would have them submit the video for approval 48 hours in advance of showing it.
When Rep. Jordan attempted to appeal the objection Nadler shut him down saying “That’s out of order. This is not debatable.”
“What’s out of order is there is no rule that requires a 48-hour notice, that’s what out of order,” Jordan hit back.
“There is such a rule,” the New York Democrat asserted.
The two argued back and forth when another member, likely a Republican, said “Mr. Chairman, what are you afraid of?”
“It’s a video about parents at school board meetings,” Jordan said, growing mor agitated. “Moms and dads speaking at school board meetings. And you guys aren’t going to let us play it?”
“Mr. Chairman, obviously you’re not going to let us play it and obviously you’re going to censor us, which is sort of the conduct of the left today it seems and Democrats today it seems,” Jordan responded.
WATCH: Fight breaks out between Rep. Jerry Nadler and Rep. Jim Jordan during a House Judiciary hearing when Nadler sustains an objection to a video Jordan wanted to be played to AG Merrick Garland. pic.twitter.com/j06MPlJduV
“Judiciary Democrats are censoring @Jim_Jordan from showing a video of American moms and dads. Classic Democrats. Afraid of the American people and truth,” Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert said on Twitter.
Judiciary Democrats are censoring @Jim_Jordan from showing a video of American moms and dads.
Classic Democrats. Afraid of the American people and truth.
The video was designed as a response to the attorney general’s Orwellian directive to the FBI and United States attorneys to investigate parents at school board meetings who object to their children wearing masks in schools and who oppose Critical Race Theory being taught as possible “domestic terrorists.”
“Citing an increase in harassment, intimidation and threats of violence against school board members, teachers and workers in our nation’s public schools, today Attorney General Merrick B. Garland directed the FBI and U.S. Attorneys’ Offices to meet in the next 30 days with federal, state, Tribal, territorial and local law enforcement leaders to discuss strategies for addressing this disturbing trend. These sessions will open dedicated lines of communication for threat reporting, assessment and response by law enforcement,” the press release said.
“Threats against public servants are not only illegal, they run counter to our nation’s core values,” Garland said. “Those who dedicate their time and energy to ensuring that our children receive a proper education in a safe environment deserve to be able to do their work without fear for their safety.”
“According to the Attorney General’s memorandum, the Justice Department will launch a series of additional efforts in the coming days designed to address the rise in criminal conduct directed toward school personnel. Those efforts are expected to include the creation of a task force, consisting of representatives from the department’s Criminal Division, National Security Division, Civil Rights Division, the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys, the FBI, the Community Relations Service and the Office of Justice Programs, to determine how federal enforcement tools can be used to prosecute these crimes, and ways to assist state, Tribal, territorial and local law enforcement where threats of violence may not constitute federal crimes,” the directive said.
“The Justice Department will also create specialized training and guidance for local school boards and school administrators. This training will help school board members and other potential victims understand the type of behavior that constitutes threats, how to report threatening conduct to the appropriate law enforcement agencies, and how to capture and preserve evidence of threatening conduct to aid in the investigation and prosecution of these crimes,” it said.
Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee sent a letter Wednesday to Attorney General Merrick Garland to demand an explanation concerning his memorandum to the Federal Bureau of Investigation over “serious concerns” regarding parents at school board meetings.
The letter, first reported by the Daily Caller, was led by Lousiana Rep. Mike Johnson and joined by 18 additional GOP House members on the committee.
“This letter is to express our serious concerns about your recent decision to involve federal law enforcement entities in local school board debates and to stifle First Amendment-protected political speech. Your actions are not just inappropriate, but also appear to have been improperly influenced by politics and by your family’s interest in the matter,” the representatives wrote.
“As members of the House Committee on the Judiciary, we have a responsibility to conduct oversight of the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and we trust that you will fully cooperate with our inquiry,” they added.
Part of the letter’s request included a call for Garland to submit himself to an ethics investigation.
The House members concluded with the “request you promptly consult with the designated agency ethics official to determine if your actions in this matter have resulted in an ethics violation for a breach of impartiality.”
“Judiciary Republicans trust that Mr. Garland will submit to our requested ethics inquiry, publicly release its results, and take whatever actions are necessary to protect the integrity of the office of Attorney General, including either recusing himself from this issue and/or rescinding the October 4th memorandum,” Johnson told the Daily Caller.
Part of the controversy stems from allegations that Garland’s son-in-law profits from work to promote critical race theory.
“The Justice Department usually has very broad standards for the appearance of impropriety that would trigger at least the inquiry into whether there was a conflict of interest,” former U.S. Assistant Attorney Andy McCarthy said during a recent interview with Fox News.
Garland’s son-in-law reportedly co-founded and works with the company Panorama Education. An educational workshop released by the company includes materials that promote critical race theory and fixate on overcoming “white supremacy,” according to Fox.
“The idea is that Garland’s son-in-law is profiting lucratively from peddling this stuff to the schools. And Garland, even though the Justice Department doesn’t appear to have jurisdiction to do what it’s done, is siccing the FBI on parents who are dissenting against these kinds of materials,” McCarthy added.
Garland sent the Oct. 4 memorandum to the FBI concerning “threats” against school personnel.
“In recent months, there has been a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff who participate in the vital work of running our nation’s schools,” the attorney general wrote.
“The Department takes these incidents seriously and is committed to using its authority and resources to discourage these threats, identify them when they occur, and prosecute them when appropriate,” Garland continued.
“In the coming days, the Department will announce a series of measures designed to address the rise in criminal conduct directed toward school personnel,” he went on. “Coordination and partnership with local law enforcement is critical to implementing these measures for the benefit of our nation’s nearly 14,000 public school districts.”
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Oct. 11 called on the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate Fulton County after the county fired two workers for allegedly shredding municipal election-related voter applications.
“After 20 years of documented failure in Fulton County elections, Georgians are tired of waiting to see what the next embarrassing revelation will be,” Raffensperger, a Republican, said in a statement. “The Department of Justice needs to take a long look at what Fulton County is doing and how their leadership disenfranchises Fulton voters through incompetence and malfeasance. The voters of Georgia are sick of Fulton County’s failures.”
Two workers in the county allegedly shredded paper voter registration applications, all of which were received within the past two weeks, the county said in a separate statement on Oct. 11.
Upon learning of it, Fulton County Commission Chairman Robb Pitts reported the situation for investigation to the office of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, a Democrat, according to the county.
“Elections are the most important function of our government,” Pitts said. “We have committed to transparency and integrity.”
A preliminary review indicated that the workers checked out batches of applications for processing. Instead of processing the forms, they shredded them.
Raffensperger said that approximately 300 applications were shredded. His office is probing the allegations.
But he wants the Department of Justice to probe the county, which has had a series of problems running elections in recent years, including counting ballots without oversight for more than an hour during the 2020 election.
A Raffensperger-appointed monitor, monitoring the election, witnessed processes he described as “badly managed, sloppy, and chaotic,” though he alleged didn’t see any fraud occur.
Fulton County officials have largely defended their practices.
Georgia Republicans passed a bill earlier this year that would allow for a state takeover of the county if issues continued occurring. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, signed it into law.
The Georgia Election Board in August voted to appoint a bipartisan panel to review the management of elections in the county, which could lead to a takeover by the state.
Former U.S. Assistant Attorney Andy McCarthy said U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland’s son-in-law profits from his work to promote critical race theory.
“The Justice Department usually has very broad standards for the appearance of impropriety that would trigger at least the inquiry into whether there was a conflict of interest,” McCarthy said.
Garland’s son-in-law reportedly co-founded and works with the company Panorama Education. An educational workshop released by the company includes materials which promote critical race theory and fixate on overcoming “white supremacy,” according to Fox News.
“The idea is Garland’s son-in-law is profiting lucratively from peddling this stuff to the schools. And Garland, even though the Justice Department doesn’t appear to have jurisdiction to do what it’s done, is sicking the FBI on parents who are dissenting against these kinds of materials,” McCarthy added.
Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul also addressed the controversy recently.
“The punk who assaulted the policeman defending my wife and I in DC went free but the Biden Admin. labels concerned parents as ‘domestic terrorists?’” Paul tweeted alongside a post from Asra Q. Nomani urging parents to contact the National Association of School Boards in response to a controversial letter the association sent to President Joe Biden on Sept. 29.
The punk who assaulted the policeman defending my wife and I in DC went free but the Biden Admin. labels concerned parents as “domestic terrorists?” https://t.co/dSsqm6TNQQ
Garland sent a memorandum to the FBI last week concerning “threats” against school personnel.
“In recent months, there has been a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence among school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff who participate in the vital work of running our nation’s schools,” the attorney general wrote.
“The Department takes these incidents seriously and is committed to using its authority and resources to discourage these threats, identify them when they occur, and prosecute them when appropriate,” Garland said.
“In the coming days, the Department will announce a series of measures designed to address the rise in criminal conduct directed toward school personnel,” he continued. “Coordination and partnership with local law enforcement is critical to implementing these measures for the benefit of our nation’s nearly 14,000 public school districts.”
BREAKING: Attorney General Merrick Garland has instructed the FBI to mobilize against parents who oppose critical race theory in public schools, citing “threats.”
The letter follows the National School Board Association’s request to classify protests as “domestic terrorism.” pic.twitter.com/NhPU03YOYq
In its September letter to Biden, the National School Boards Association pleaded with him to treat parents who oppose mask mandates and the teaching of critical race theory as domestic terrorists.
The NSBA letter said, “As these acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials have increased, the classification of these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”
America First Legal formally requests an ‘investigation regarding potential improprieties’ of Merrick’s memo
The National School Boards Association (NSBA) recently characterized the effort of parents who engage in passionate opposition to forced masking and the indoctrination of their children through critical race theory (CRT) as a form of “domestic terrorism.” In response, a Florida mom equates the weaponization of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) against parents trying to protect their children to “using dogs and water hoses on black Americans fighting for civil rights.”
How it Began
On Oct. 4, Attorney General Merrick Garland issued a memo instructing the director of the FBI addressing what he described as “a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff who participate in the vital work of running our nation’s public schools.”
The memo was in response to a Sept. 29 letter (pdf) from the NSBA to the Biden administration comparing what it describes as “attacks against school board members and educators for approving policies for masks to protect the health and safety of students and school employees” and “physical threats because of propaganda purporting the false inclusion of critical race theory within classroom instruction and curricula” as “equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”
For this, the NSBA’s letter “specifically solicits the expertise and resources of the U.S. Department of Justice, FBI, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Secret Service, and its National Threat Assessment Center regarding the level of risk to public school children, educators, board members, and facilities/campuses.”
The NSBA also requested “assistance of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service to intervene against threatening letters and cyberbullying attacks that have been transmitted to students, school board members, district administrators, and other educators.”
“While spirited debate about policy matters is protected under our Constitution, that protection does not extend to threats of violence or efforts to intimidate individuals based on their views” Garland stated in his memo to the FBI. “Threats against public servants are not only illegal, they run counter to our nation’s core values. Those who dedicate their time and energy to ensuring that our children receive a proper education in a safe environment deserve to be able to do their work without fear for their safety.”
Parents Speak Out
According to Quisha King, the government knows that the growing number of parents who are going to school board meetings to voice their opinions against CRT are gaining a lot of attention, and “they want to do everything possible to shut that down.”
King—the Florida mom whose comments before the Duval County School Board went viral on social media in June—said the school board members who are determined to push their agenda are now so desperate to stop the momentum of the parents who oppose them “they will use the government against its own people” to silence them.
“We probably never thought that would happen in America,” King told The Epoch Times. “It’s outrageous.”
A file photo of Quisha King. (Courtesy of Quisha King)
Asked if the threat to use the FBI to treat parents who oppose CRT at school board meetings as domestic terrorists would dissuade her from speaking out in the future, King said “absolutely not.”
“In fact, I think this is going to backfire,” King asserted. “You’re going to see even more parents. Of all sides of the political spectrum, come out and say ‘wait a minute, the FBI is coming after parents who just want to give their children the best life possible.’ This isn’t going to dissuade us. It’s only going to rally more of us.”
While King concedes there may have been instances of parents expressing anger at meetings or sending inappropriate emails, she is unaware of anyone erupting into violence or harming any school board members. King also said the threat to use the power of the FBI to shut down parents who are turning out in increasing numbers to stand up for their children at school board meetings is only going to open the eyes of parents who have “been teetering” on the idea of pulling their children from public schools altogether and finally “tip them over the edge.”
During her speech at Thursday’s Family Research Council’s annual Pray Vote Stand Summit, King received an extended standing ovation when she suggested parents stage a “mass exodus” from the public system. Asked to expand on that statement, King said she has already begun working on the idea by speaking to parents who may be hesitant and working with them to find solutions before setting a specific date to stage the “mass exodus” on a national level.
“Anyone who is involved in wanting to have freedom and liberty in this country and believes in what this country stands for is being attacked,” Duval County, Florida, resident April Carney told The Epoch Times, saying part of the reason why she chose to run for a position on the school board is because the choices of parents are systematically being taken away.
“Those of us who are parents and are thoroughly involved in our child’s education, we want to be included in the decision making process regarding the curriculum and the rules and regulations that are being put in place in schools,” Carney said. “That has completely stopped. There’s been too much activism brought into the classroom and not enough emphasis on reading, writing and arithmetic, science and our students are failing because of that.”
Karen Schoen at home in Flagler County Florida in 2017. (Photo courtesy of Karen Schoen)
“Our first problem as Americans is we aren’t naming the enemy,” Karen Schoen, a former educator and dean in the New York school system told The Epoch Times, suggesting that the real enemy are the “globalist communists” seated in positions of power on both sides of the political aisle.
“Communism cannot have opposition or dissent,” Schoen insisted. “They will not tolerate anybody who calls them out, and now that Americans are fighting back they are weaponizing government agencies to shut down any dissent.”
“We don’t want to co-parent with the government,” Jessico Bowman told The Epoch Times. “We want to be involved in our children’s education and upbringing because that’s our responsibility.”
“If the DOJ wants to classify that as domestic terrorism that’s really the DOJ’s problem,” Charles Bowman added, saying that when it comes down to it, the community will rally together. “We are going to voice our opinion and we are going to support the people who want to voice their opinions.”
“Who gets to decide what’s a threat versus just an angry parent speaking out?” Jessico asked. “Do we trust them [the government] to make that determination for us at the federal level?”
Charles and Jessico Bowman participating in the October “ground game” as members of the Republican Liberty Caucus ahead of the 2020 election in Lake County, Fla. (Photo courtesy of Charles and Jessico Bowman)
“If you as parents are not going to advocate for the best interests of your children then who will,” Charles interjected. “Like Jessico said, we’re not interested in co-parenting with the government at all. But it is our responsibility as parents to make sure our children are safe. If we don’t, we can be labeled as cowards.”
As The Epoch Times reported in August, the Bowmans were recently embroiled in a struggle with the Flagler County school system regarding a surprise, random, haphazard COVID-19 protocol that had children being sent to isolation rooms, quarantined at home with requirements to undergo a series of COVID-19 tests and leaving confused parents scrambling to make sense of it all.
“They don’t want people speaking their mind,” Charles said. “They don’t want people having a voice in this process. This has always been part of the left’s playground in the public education system, so here you are, they’ve rattled the right to the point where conservatives are getting involved. Now they’re trying to figure out how to get the conservatives quiet again. They’ve overstepped, and now they’re trying to figure out how to regain control over the sandbox.
Conservative Organizations Join Parents
“What the NSBA did, requesting that the FBI weaponize the federal government against parents and grandparents is not only a strict violation of the First Amendment, it is the most egregious abuse of power I have seen recently,” Keith Flaugh, founder of the Florida Citizens Alliance told The Epoch Times.
Keith Flaugh speaks at Florida Citizens Alliance Gala in Ocala, Feb. 2020. (Photo courtesy of Keith Flaugh)
“We are big supporters of the Tenth Amendment,” Flaugh added, “and I think this is going to force the issue of governors like Ron DeSantis to use the Tenth Amendment.”
The Tenth Amendment—passed by Congress on Sept. 25, 1789 and ratified Dec. 15, 1791—states that “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Flaugh further stated that this effort to use the power of the government against its own citizens is “also a beacon call to every constitutional sheriff in the country.”
“A constitutional sheriff has the legal authority and duty to interpose against the federal government when they are overreaching their constitutional authority,” Flaugh explained. “We’ve got a federal government that’s completely out of control and we’ve seen it manifest itself on a number of fronts. This is just the latest and most egregious. It is literally weaponizing the federal government against its citizens. And even though it will probably make me one of their targets I will be urging people to stand up and say I will not comply.”
“We’re urging people to do it peacefully,” Flaugh clarified, “but at the end of the day, I will not comply, period. Full stop.”
In an Oct. 7 letter (pdf) addressed to The Hon. Michael E. Horowitz, Inspector General for the Department of Justice, Reed D. Rubinstein, Senior Counselor and Director of Oversight and Investigations for the America First Legal (AFL) Foundation formally requested an “Investigation Regarding Potential Improprieties Related to the October 4, 2021, Attorney General’s Memorandum.”
“The Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized American parents’ fundamental liberty interest in and Constitutional right to control and direct the education of their own children,” Rubinstein states in the letter. However, Rubenstein asserts that the DOJ appears to be “committing the full weight of its federal law enforcement resources to prevent parents from exercising constitutionally-protected rights and privileges, for inappropriate partisan purposes.”
In addition, under the Freedom of Information Act, the AFL Foundation has also filed a request (pdf) for the following documents:
All records of, concerning, or regarding (1) the Garland Memorandum and/or (2) the NSBA Letter.
All records sufficient to show each person within the Department who reviewed (1) the Garland Memorandum and/or (2) the NSBA Letter.
All records created by the Department showing the “disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence” referenced in the Garland Memorandum.
All records the Department relied upon to support the Garland Memorandum statement “there has been a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff who participate in the vital work of running our nation’s public schools.”
All records created by the Department showing “the rise in criminal conduct directed toward school personnel” referenced in the Garland Memorandum.
All records the Department relied upon to support the Garland Memorandum statement there has been “a rise in criminal conduct directed toward school personnel.”
All records sufficient to show the Department’s understanding and interpretation of the term “intimidation and harassment” used in the Garland Memorandum.
All communications from, with, or regarding any person employed by the National Education Association and/or the American Federation of Teachers.
All communications with any person having an email address including eop.gov regarding (1) the Garland Memorandum, (2) the NSBA, (3) the NSBA Letter, the National Education Association and/or the American Federation of Teachers and/or (5) any person employed by the National Education Association and/or the American Federation of Teachers.
Asked about the optics of FBI agents descending upon school board meetings to drag parents away from podiums, King was forthright in her prediction.
“It will be reminiscent of using dogs and water hoses on black Americans who were fighting for civil rights,” she said bluntly.
The Epoch Times reached out to the NSBA and FBI for comment.
As I mentioned in this space last July, the politicization of the United States’ armed forces, already underway under President Barack Obama, has been kicked into a higher gear by the Biden administration and its tame general, Mark Milley, by using the Capitol incursion of last Jan. 6 as pretext.
By repeatedly and consistently mischaracterizing it as an “insurrection,” the media have turned a protest that got out of hand into the bombardment of Fort Sumter, which launched the American Civil War in 1861.
That the Biden administration was complicit with the media in transforming a rag-tag bunch of protesters into a supposed proto-army of rebellion became apparent in President Biden’s address to Congress last April 28.
There, clearly with the Jan. 6 protesters in mind, he spoke of “what our intelligence agency has determined to be the most lethal terrorist threat to the homeland today: white supremacy’s terrorism.”
The logic of “our” intelligence agency which is said to have produced such a bizarre and improbable point of view seems to have been as follows: Donald Trump is a white supremacist; his Jan. 6 supporters were terrorists; therefore, all 74 million Trump voters in 2020 (there are probably more by now) are at least potential white supremacist terrorists.
That’s quite a threat all right. Or it would be if any of it had an iota of truth in it.
Such paranoia obviously had a political motivation and must have been adopted for cynical reasons, as a stick with which to beat any opposition to the radical Biden agenda from the right.
But now, not quite six months later, it appears to have become a habit with this administration to confuse any opposition to any part of its agenda with “terrorism.”
In response to a letter from the National School Boards Association to President Biden complaining of an “imminent threat” from parents who are allegedly sending “threatening letters and cyberbullying” said to amount to “a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes,” Attorney General Merrick Garland has sent a memo to the FBI—the extent of whose corruption is even now being revealed by John Durham—expressing his concern over an alleged “disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff who participate in the vital work of running our nation’s public schools.”
He provides not a single example of such harassment, intimidation or threats of violence, nor any constitutional warrant for such Federal interference in state and local education matters and public order-keeping, even if there were any of either.
“While spirited debate about policy matters is protected under our Constitution,” he writes, “that protection does not extend to threats of violence or efforts to intimidate individuals based on their views.”
Andrew McCarthy at National Review, who calls this “dangerous nonsense,” reminds us that “the First Amendment protects speech unless it unambiguously calls for the use of force that the speaker clearly intends, under circumstances in which the likelihood of violence is real and imminent. Even actual ‘threats of violence’ are not actionable unless they meet this high threshold.”
And this is not to mention the fact that, as more than one commentator has pointed out, we have in the last year and a half seen numerous left-wing examples of “threats of violence or efforts to intimidate individuals based on their views,” which have been perfectly OK with the Justice department and the FBI.
What, in fact, is Garland himself doing with such a memo as this if not warning of the FBI’s coming “efforts to intimidate individuals based on their views”?
This looks a lot like a recurrence to President Nixon’s famous formulation: “When the President does it, it’s not illegal.” As in so many other ways throughout the Obama-Biden years, there is one rule for the ruling class, another for everybody else.
This politicization of the Justice Department continues a process which seems to have begun under President Obama and then continued on unabated, though surreptitiously, under President Trump, whose administration it sought, as we now know, continuously to undermine.
Interestingly, another case of an effort to intimidate an individual based on her views had taken place only days earlier, when protestors pursued Senator Kyrsten Sinema into a ladies’ room at Arizona State University, objecting to her view that the government headed by Biden and her fellow Democrats’ shouldn’t be spending $3.5 trillion that it doesn’t have.
In that case, however, neither the president nor Attorney General Garland nor anyone else in the administration seemed to mind, and “the big guy” himself dismissed the incident as nothing but a “part of the process.”
I thought of this remark when I read the opinion of “a lawyer friend” of the excellent Paul Mirengoff at PowerLine blog that the Garland letter was just “huffing and puffing done to scratch a political itch” with no real legal force behind it. Mirengoff himself opines that “anyone prosecuted by the DOJ for non- violent conduct as a result of this memo will very likely find pro bono legal representation and beat the rap.”
This is true—at least until the entire judiciary has been Bidenized. But in the meantime, such a person may only “beat the rap” the way General Michael Flynn did: after years of expensive litigation that all but ruined him and his family financially.
As he knows only too well, under the politicized Obama-Biden Justice Department, the punishment reserved for dissenters is, precisely, “the process.”
Parents opposed to critical race theory (CRT) in California classrooms are outraged over accusations from school boards that criticism of ethnic studies curriculums based on CRT and other neo-Marxist ideologies is linked to domestic terrorism.
The National School Boards Association (NSBA), which denies CRT is being taught in K-12 schools, in a Sept. 29 letter (pdf) said parents at local school board meetings opposed to CRT and mask mandates are contributing to a “growing number of threats of violence and acts of intimidation occurring across the nation” and asked President Joe Biden’s administration to address the issue.
The NSBA letter states: “As these acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials have increased, the classification of these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”
Celeste Fiehler, a member of ParentsUnion.org, told The Epoch Times the NSBA comparison of parents to “domestic terrorism” is ludicrous and wrong.
“It’s ridiculous. It’s an intimidation tactic,” she said. “I’m not afraid of the FBI knocking on my door because I stood up for my kid as a parent.”
She opposes CRT, which she calls “hate-based” education that divides students into oppressed and oppressors based on race and privilege.
“When you take power away from parents, or their ability to raise their children, you’re going to get angry parents—parents who love their children,” said Fiehler, whose children attend the Desert Sands Unified School District (DSUSD) in Riverside County.
“We’re not knocking down podiums. We’re not burning down school buildings. We’re asking for fair education for our children, and what we oppose is the curriculum,” Fiehler said.
A Desert Sands Unified School District school board meeting on Oct. 5, 2021. (Screenshot via DUHSD)
AG and DOJ Respond
Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland responded with a memorandum and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) issued a press release announcing a concerted effort to target threats of violence, intimidation, and harassment by parents directed toward school board members, teachers, and other personnel.
“Threats against public servants are not only illegal, they run counter to our nation’s core values,” wrote Attorney General Garland. “Those who dedicate their time and energy to ensuring that our children receive a proper education in a safe environment deserve to be able to do their work without fear for their safety.”
Garland has directed his office and the FBI “to meet in the next 30 days with federal, state, Tribal, territorial and local law enforcement leaders to discuss strategies for addressing this disturbing trend. These sessions will open dedicated lines of communication for threat reporting, assessment and response by law enforcement,” according to the press release.
The DOJ will create a task force consisting of representatives from the department’s Criminal Division, National Security Division, Civil Rights Division, the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys, the FBI, the Community Relations Service and the Office of Justice Programs “to determine how federal enforcement tools can be used to prosecute these crimes, and ways to assist state, Tribal, territorial and local law enforcement where threats of violence may not constitute federal crimes.”
The DOJ will also create specialized training and guidance for local school boards and administrators to “help school board members and other potential victims understand the type of behavior that constitutes threats, how to report threatening conduct to the appropriate law enforcement agencies, and how to capture and preserve evidence of threatening conduct to aid in the investigation and prosecution of these crimes.”
Riverside County
Fiehler blasted the “domestic terrorist” label at a DSUSD meeting on Tuesday.
“If you think for one second, that parents who love their children and are here to protect them … are domestic terrorists, then consider every single one of us just that,” Fiehler said.
“Being a domestic terrorist, you’ll see me in the pickup line and the drop-off lines of three different schools, rushing three kids to sports, and at the high school football games because I love my children,” she told the board.
“What you won’t see is this tired terrorist mom doing is burning down buildings, destroying property, physically assaulting people throwing Molotov cocktails out my car window, or murdering anyone,” she said, referring to incidents during the 2020 summer riots. “I’m a law-abiding citizen who wants a fair and healthy education for my children.”
“So, don’t mess with parents protecting their children because you will lose,” she concluded.
Fiehler said Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris downplayed the violence that occurred during protests following the death of George Floyd last year.
“Thousands of people were injured, hundreds of lives were changed forever, and a lot of people died because of them,” she said.
Rather than policing parents, she said “the activists should be investigated.”
Fiehler said some school boards have taken steps to disrupt the conversation on CRT and other important topics, including censoring videos of public meetings on YouTube to remove parents’ comments and removing chairs to limit the seating capacity at meetings.
Monterey County
Kelly Schenkoske, a Monterey County parent who homeschools her children, has opposed the ethnic studies curriculum and CRT at Salinas Union High School District (SUHSD) meetings.
The NSBA’s comparison of parents protesting CRT to domestic terrorism, suggesting there is some kind of moral equivalency, is simply false, she said.
“They want to shut down any dissenting voices. They want conformity,” Schenkoske said. “While they’re attempting to silence the civic engagement of parents and taxpayers, they’re ramping up efforts to push civic engagement on youth.”
Many teachers in public schools are actively recruiting unsuspecting “young foot soldiers” to promote their own political ideologies, she said.
The book, “Rethinking Ethnic Studies,” by R. Tolteka Cuauhtin, encourages student activism and talks about the youth voice as imperative, Schenkoske said.
“It showcases their agenda for all,” she said.
SUHSD has recently used a new tactic, allowing students to comment first at school board meetings, Schenkoske said. Though there hasn’t been a change in official board policy, she said it’s another strategy the board has used to silence dissenting opinions and block criticism.
At the last board meeting, parents who requested their three minutes to speak were denied the opportunity because of the new policy.
“None of them were ever allowed to speak. Students were given the entire allotted time,” she said.
SUHSD teacher Peter Williams has mentioned several times at recent school board meetings that parents opposed to CRT should not be allowed to speak.
Orange County
Irvine parent David Whitley told The Epoch Times many parents in Orange County are fed up with what public schools are teaching, and many parents have chosen CRT as “a hill to die on.”
“We’re either going to get this nonsense tampered down, or people like me are going to leave the state. There’s no reason to stay in a place that is completely anti-American and growing to be anti-white under the guise of anti-racism. It just defies logic and reason,” he said.
Comparing irate parents to domestic terrorists is “completely absurd,” he said. “If there’s one thing parents should be doing, it’s being extremely angry at what the public schools are teaching their kids … so I am ecstatic that more and more parents are going to the school board meetings and speaking up.”
Though “it’s a little bit late in the day” to try to fix public schools in the state, Whitley said parents can no longer sit back and watch what’s happening.
Whitley said it’s not surprising that the recent backlash from parents has left local school boards and other government officials feeling threatened.
“They should,” he said, “because the country is run by families and by parents. The public schools are there to educate their kids so that they’re informed and good citizens, and what they’re doing in the public schools is literally dividing the nation and destroying the country.”
Whitley urged more parents to stand up against the school boards.
Children are being taught to have “different moral views, different views on sexuality, different views on American history, different views on the nuclear family and their place in life itself,” he said. “It’s just absurd.”
While he’s glad to see so many mothers at school board meetings, Whitley said more fathers are now showing up.
“That may be why they’re intimidated, because it’s not just a bunch of soccer moms that are talking at the school board meetings now,” he said.
“And, they want to intimidate us with the power of the FBI? Well, I know people in law enforcement, and they don’t like what’s going on either,” Whitley said. “So, it’s going to come to a head at some point because what I know is the parents that are upset by this aren’t going away until they’re either in handcuffs or they stop indoctrinating their children.”
Californians for Equal Rights
Meanwhile, the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation (CFER) on Oct. 1, joined forces with 20 organizations in response (pdf) to NSBA’s “fear-mongering” letter,” the organization stated in a media release.
“Going forward, CFER will stand with our parent and community supporters in the unifying and broad-based movement against toxic racial divisions and political indoctrination in our public education system,” according to the media release.
“CFER is particularly alarmed by DOJ’s categorical allegation of grassroots activities at the school district level as ‘criminal conduct,’ and how this call for federal investigations can gravely discourage civic participation,” the media release stated.
“In response to community demands for more transparency and parental access to controversial educational activities, CFER has engaged in local organizing and awareness building on issues such as ethnic studies, critical race theory and racial preferences,” said Frank Xu, CFER president.
“Contrary to the victim narrative promoted by DOJ to coddle school board personnel, lack of responsiveness and accountability on the part of many public-school authorities has prompted a growing number of parents speaking at open meetings and seeking legitimate channels to express their concerns,” the release stated.
One parenting leader is speaking out after Attorney General Merrick Garland sent a memorandum from the Department of Justice to the FBI to address supposed “threats of violence” from parents.
Asra Nomani joined Fox News’ “Fox & Friends” on Wednesday morning wearing a T-shirt with the words, “I’m a mom, not a ‘domestic terrorist.’”
“It’s outrageous what the federal government is doing now,” said Nomani, who is vice president for strategy and investigations for Parents Defining Education.
“We have parents right now waking up from sea to shining sea to bring their children to school, to urge them into the day, and what has happened now is that the federal government and the National School Board Association has declared a war on parents,” she said.
Nomani responded that the only goal of parents is to speak up for their children.
“All we have done over the past year is stand up and speak up for children. It’s unconscionable that the Federal Bureau of Investigations should even spend a minute thinking about us,” she said.
“We all reject violence and all we want to do is protect our kids,” Nomani added.
The government needs to stop demonizing us as parents: Parents Defining Education member @AsraNomani rips the DOJ’s ‘overreaching’ probe into potential threat against school boards. pic.twitter.com/XD4NbgzQUF
Her efforts on social media also have caught the attention of Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul.
“The punk who assaulted the policeman defending my wife and I in DC went free but the Biden Admin. labels concerned parents as ‘domestic terrorists?’” Paul tweeted alongside a post from Nomani urging parents to contact the National School Board Association in response to its letter.
The punk who assaulted the policeman defending my wife and I in DC went free but the Biden Admin. labels concerned parents as “domestic terrorists?” https://t.co/dSsqm6TNQQ
“In recent months, there has been a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence among school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff who participate in the vital work of running our nation’s schools,” the attorney general wrote.
“The Department takes these incidents seriously and is committed to using its authority and resources to discourage these threats, identify them when they occur, and prosecute them when appropriate,” Garland said.
“In the coming days, the Department will announce a series of measures designed to address the rise in criminal conduct directed toward school personnel,” he continued. “Coordination and partnership with local law enforcement is critical to implementing these measures for the benefit of our nation’s nearly 14,000 public school districts.”
BREAKING: Attorney General Merrick Garland has instructed the FBI to mobilize against parents who oppose critical race theory in public schools, citing “threats.”
The letter follows the National School Board Association’s request to classify protests as “domestic terrorism.” pic.twitter.com/NhPU03YOYq
The NSBA letter said, “As these acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials have increased, the classification of these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes.”
The Department of Justice (DOJ) Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco defended a new directive by U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland to stop a rise in what school officials call “threats and harassment” by parents who have been attending public school board meetings.
“I want to be very clear in the memorandum that’s publicly available, the Attorney General issued talks about the importance of bringing federal, state, local law enforcement together to make sure that there is awareness of how to report threats that may occur, and to ensure that there’s an open line of communication to address threats, to address violence, and to address law enforcement issues in that context, which is the job of the Justice Department, nothing more,” Monaco said at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Tuesday.
In 2021, there has been a rise in parents attending school board meetings and voicing their concerns about their child’s school curriculum and in many videos, parents are seen vehemently opposing the teaching of critical race theory and school mask mandates.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) asked Monaco about Garland’s recent memorandum which seeks to investigate any threats of violence, intimidation, and harassment by parents toward school personnel.
In the document, the AG directs the FBI and U.S. attorneys to convene meetings with federal, state, and local leaders within 30 days to “facilitate the discussion of strategies for addressing threats against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff,” according to a letter (pdf) the attorney general sent on Monday to all U.S. attorneys, the FBI director, the director of the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys, and the assistant attorney general of the DOJ’s criminal division.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) speaks during a hearing to examine the United States Special Operations Command and United States Cyber Command in the review of the Defense Authorization Request for the fiscal year 2022 and the Future Years Defense Program, on Capitol Hill in Washington, on March 25, 2021. (Andrew Harnik-Pool/Getty Images)
Merrick’s letter comes only days after a national association of school boards (NSBA) asked the Biden administration to take “extraordinary measures” to prevent alleged threats against school staff that the association said were coming from parents who oppose mask mandates and the teaching of critical race theory.
“As these acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials have increased, the classification of these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crime,” the NSBA argued in the letter, encouraging the federal agencies to use laws designed to target domestic terrorism, such as the PATRIOT Act, to address the issue.
“Is it domestic extremism for a parent to advocate for their child’s best interests?” Cotton asked the Deputy AG.
“I think what you have described no I would not describe as domestic extremism,” replied Monaco.
Cotton linked the NSBA letter as a possible motivation for issuing the DOJ memorandum.
“It’s a fact that the school board association just sent this letter to President Biden and then conveniently the Attorney General released his letter yesterday, describing his series of measures to confront this grave and the growing threat of parents protesting their kids being indoctrinated and the school board having to call a recess. [Is there] a connection between those two things?” asked Cotton.
When questioned by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) on the legitimacy of the new directive, Monaco again defended Merrick, saying “spirited debate” is welcome at board meetings but added that “the Attorney General’s memorandum made quite clear that violence is not appropriate.”
Hawley implied that the DOJ’s new directive could take away parents’ rights because the document does not make clear what is encompassed by the terms “harassment or intimidation.”
“I don’t think so, Miss Monaco. With all due respect, it didn’t make it quite clear, it doesn’t define those terms, nor does it define harassment or intimidation. It talks about violence, I think we can agree that violence shouldn’t be condoned or looked aside from in any way, swept under the rug at all. But harassment and intimidation. What do those terms mean in the context of a local school board meeting?” asked Hawley.
The DOJ did not immediately return a request to comment.
As President Joe Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland keeps proving how right Republicans were to keep him off the Supreme Court.
Since his confirmation in March, Garland has repeatedly shown how willing he is to use the Justice Department for politically driven causes — from his handling of the fallout from the death of George Floyd, to his opposition to voter integrity laws, to his memo Monday to the FBI to crack down on parents protesting the decisions of their local school board.
If knee-jerk partisanship in the hands of a term-limited political appointee is dangerous, imagine the same man in a lifetime job on the nation’s highest court.
Most Americans should remember that Garland was the federal judge chosen in 2016 by then-President Barack Obama to fill the Supreme Court seat left vacant by the untimely death of conservative Justice Antonin Scalia.
That nomination was stonewalled by the Republican Senate under then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (even McConnell’s most vicious critics on the right have to acknowledge that act of political heroism for the future of the Republic).
In an interview Tuesday morning on “Fox & Friends,” Colorado Republican Rep. Ken Buck brought up Garland’s past as a federal judge to explain why the order to the FBI on Monday was so troubling.
“Attorney General Garland was a judge, and he should know better than to try to use the FBI for political speech. So many of the courtrooms that we go into, we see this Greek goddess of Themis who had a scale on her left hand and the sword in her right hand, and she’s blindfolded,” Buck said.
“And she’s blindfolded because justice is blind. Justice is impartial — doesn’t care whether you’re white or black, man or woman, tall or short. Justice should not be used to attack a group of people expressing their opinions at school board meetings, whether they’re in favor of critical race theory or whether they’re opposed to critical race theory. Whether they’re in favor of masks or vaccines or opposed.
“That’s political speech that needs to be protected.”
Check it out here. Buck’s comments about Garland come about the 3-minute mark.
That’s all true, of course. The question is whether Garland believes it.
As conservative commentator Dennis Prager pointed out during the fight over Garland’s nomination, mainstream media outlets and liberal commentators went to huge lengths to paint Garland as the “moderate” kind of judge Americans needed on the high court, when the reality was he was a predictable liberal, likely to side predictably with the left on major issues from abortion to immigration to Second Amendment rights.
Even in an era dominated by lies from the administration — “if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor” of Obamacare — and lies promulgated by the mainstream media — the “hands up, don’t shoot” that helped launch Black Lives Matter as a movement — Garland’s alleged “centrism” was a major assault against verifiable truth.Is the Biden Justice Department a threat to American freedom?Yes No Completing this poll entitles you to The Western Journal news updates free of charge. You may opt out at anytime. You also agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
As if to prove it, the attorney general, the very same man whom luminaries at liberal outlets from coast to coast — like The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times — assured the country would be a “centrist,” has taken militantly leftists positions at every opportunity.
Instead of a moderate, Garland is revealing himself to be an attorney general firmly on the side of the progressive left, using the Justice Department to file a lawsuit against Texas over its pro-life law, for instance, or overseeing the treatment of defendants in cases stemming from the Jan. 6 Capitol incursion. (Even a liberal publication like The Daily Beast acknowledged the government’s bias, albeit from a twisted perspective.)
But with his latest move, Garland is showing himself to be the kind of AG only a progressive protofascist could dream of.
He’s openly ordering the Federal Bureau of Investigation — the FBI, for goodness’ sake — to keep tabs on the efforts of American parents who don’t want their kids subjected to critical race theory brainwashing, or requirements to keep their faces and noses covered throughout the school day on scientifically questionable grounds. (This isn’t just a view from the conservative side. If New York Media’s The Intelligencer doesn’t buy the mask argument, it’s got holes.)
With his memo on Monday, Garland proved he’s all too willing to wield the powers of the federal government to put the efforts of parents worried about their children’s education and future on a par with domestic terrorism.
At the same time, he’s part of the administration of a president whose political party took the side of actual domestic terrorism last year when mobs tore apart American cities and Democrats cheered them on (or bailed them out).
Of course, a Garland defender could make the argument that Garland the attorney general is a different creature from Garland as Supreme Court justice — that he’s only fulfilling a role and he would have fulfilled duties on the high court differently. But it’s a hollow point.
Garland clearly thinks he has a legal right to take the actions he has, which means that as a Supreme Court justice, he’d likely approve of similar high-handed tactics on the part of the government (certainly as long as it was a Democratic administration implementing them).
Every day since his inauguration in January, Joe Biden has shown he’s not at all the “centrist” that was sold to the American public by a hideously biased mainstream media during the 2020 election.
Every day since he was confirmed, Merrick Garland has shown the same about himself.
Rep. Buck was right. Garland was a judge and should know better than to give the FBI an order like the one he gave on Monday.
He clearly doesn’t, or he doesn’t care.
And he almost had a lifetime seat on the United States Supreme Court.
In Joe Biden’s America, the Department of Justice has decided that dissent is a danger to democracy and parents speaking their minds at local school boards are a threat to America’s core values.
In a memo to the FBI on Monday, Attorney General Merrick Garland wrote that the Justice Department will launch an effort to stop what he called called “a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff who participate in the vital work of running our nation’s public schools.”
Garland’s memo comes after the National School Boards Association wrote to the White House to complain about activist parents who oppose COVID-19 policies — such as remote education, vaccine mandates and mask mandates — as well as the imposition of critical race theory in public schools.
While defending mandatory mask policies as protecting “the health and safety of students and school employees” and denying critical race theory is being taught in public schools, the association called upon Garland to look at every possible way to prosecute parents standing up for their children, including the use of domestic terrorism laws.
“As these acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials have increased, the classification of these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes,” the letter stated.
Garland’s memo appeared to equate parents speaking up against White House and teacher union-backed policies with actual threats of violence.
“While spirited debate about policy matters is protected under our Constitution, that protection does not extend to threats of violence or efforts to intimidate individuals based on their views,” he wrote.
“Threats against public servants are not only illegal, they run counter to our nation’s core values. Those who dedicate their time and energy to ensuring that our children receive a proper education in a safe environment deserve to be able to do their work without fear for their safety.”
According to a Justice Department news release published Monday, one goal will be training school boards in how to document threats and preserve evidence to properly punish parents speaking their minds.
However, in the memo, Garland also ordered the FBI to join with local law enforcement to discuss “strategies for addressing threats against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff, and will open dedicated lines of communication for threat reporting, assessment, and response.”
“Coordination and partnership with local law enforcement is critical to implementing these measures for the benefit of our nation’s nearly 14,000 public school districts. To this end, I am directing the Federal Bureau of Investigation, working with each United States Attorney, to convene meetings with federal, state, local, Tribal, and territorial leaders in each federal judicial district within 30 days of the issuance of this memorandum.”
The department will create a task force “to determine how federal enforcement tools can be used to prosecute these crimes, and ways to assist state, Tribal, territorial and local law enforcement where threats of violence may not constitute federal crimes,” the release stated.
Many social media users criticized what they described as an attack on parents.
The Biden administration is rapidly repurposing federal law enforcement to target political opposition.
They want to reclassify dissent as “disinformation” and “domestic terrorism,” justifying an unprecedented intervention, both directly and in partnership with tech companies.
As opposed to actual violence by BLM and Antifa. Billions of dollars in damages. But darn those pesky school boards who want to voice an opinion the Dictator doesn’t like
DOJ launching effort to combat threats of violence against school officialshttps://t.co/vDaXmspUEo
The DOJ is sending FBI agents to destroy your life if you criticize the Dogma of Weingarten on behalf of your kids, but everything is totally fine and there’s nothing to see here.
BREAKING: Attorney General Merrick Garland has instructed the FBI to mobilize against parents who oppose critical race theory in public schools, citing “threats.”
The letter follows the National School Board Association’s request to classify protests as “domestic terrorism.” pic.twitter.com/NhPU03YOYq
NSBA interim Executive Director and CEO Chip Slaven praised Garland’s memo, according to the New York Post.
“Over the last few weeks, school board members and other education leaders have received death threats and have been subjected to threats and harassment, both online and in-person,” Slaven said in a statement, according to the Post.
“The individuals who are intent on causing chaos and disrupting our schools—many of whom are not even connected to local schools—are drowning out the voices of parents who must be heard when it comes to decisions about their children’s education, health, and safety. These acts of intimidation are also affecting educational services and school board governance. Some have even led to school lockdowns,” the statement said.
Attorney General Merrick Garland announced Monday that the FBI would take the lead on the law enforcement response to what Garland called “a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff.”
“While spirited debate about policy matters is protected under our Constitution, that protection does not extend to threats of violence or efforts to intimidate individuals based on their views,” Garland wrote in a memo to federal prosecutors as well as FBI Director Christopher Wray. “Threats against public servants are not only illegal, they run counter to our nation’s core values.
“Those who dedicate their time and energy to ensuring that our children receive a proper education in a safe environment deserve to be able to do their work without fear for their safety,” the AG added.
Garland fired off his memo days after the National School Boards Association (NSBA) claimed in a letter to President Biden that “America’s public schools and its education leaders are under an immediate threat,” as parents grow frustrated with mask mandates being imposed on their children and critical race theory being injected into their curricula.
The Sept. 29 letter cited that opposition — naming the imposition of mask mandates in schools as well as “propaganda purporting the false inclusion of critical race theory within classroom instruction and curricula” as the causes of dozens of incidents at school board meetings this year.
A Loudoun County School Board meeting was halted because the crowd refused to quiet down in Ashburn, Virginia.
“This propaganda continues despite the fact that critical race theory is not taught in public schools and remains a complex law school and graduate school subject well beyond the scope of a K-12 class,” the letter went on, despite incidents across the country where teachers have been exposed to be racializing their curricula.
The NSBA then suggested that “[a]s these acts of malice, violence, and threats against public school officials have increased, the classification of these heinous actions could be the equivalent to a form of domestic terrorism and hate crimes” and asked that the administration review the question.
The letter went on to cite more than 20 reported incidents in California, Florida, Georgia, New Jersey, Ohio and other states. In one incident from September, an Illinois man was arrested on charges of aggravated battery and disorderly conduct for allegedly striking a school official at a meeting.
“We are coming after you,” a letter mailed to an Ohio school board member said, according to the group. “You are forcing them to wear mask — for no reason in this world other than control. And for that you will pay dearly.”
FBI Director Christopher Wray was ordered to arrange meetings with federal, state, and local school officials.
In his memo, Garland ordered the FBI and US attorneys to arrange meetings with federal, state, local, tribal and territorial leaders within 30 days to “facilitate the discussion of strategies for addressing threats” and “open dedicated lines of communication for threat reporting, assessment, and response.”
NSBA interim Executive Director and CEO Chip Slaven said in a statement that Garland’s action sent a “strong message to individuals with violent intent who are focused on causing chaos, disrupting our public schools, and driving wedges between school boards and the parents, students, and communities they serve.”
“Over the last few weeks, school board members and other education leaders have received death threats and have been subjected to threats and harassment, both online and in person,” Slaven said. “The individuals who are intent on causing chaos and disrupting our schools—many of whom are not even connected to local schools—are drowning out the voices of parents who must be heard when it comes to decisions about their children’s education, health, and safety. These acts of intimidation are also affecting educational services and school board governance. Some have even led to school lockdowns.”
“We need to get back to the work of meeting all students’ needs and making sure that each student is prepared for a successful future,” Slaven concluded. “That’s what school board members and parents care about.”
The radical left want’s to label concerned parents as ‘Domestic Terrorists’… January 6 narrative 2.0
President Joe Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland is officially mobilizing the FBI and U.S. attorneys to “investigate and prosecute” protests by parents against things like mask mandates and critical race theory at public school board meetings and schools across the country.
“Threats against public servants are not only illegal, they run counter to our nation’s core values,” Garland wrote in a memo that he sent to FBI Director Christopher Wray and Justice Department prosecutors on Monday. “Those who dedicate their time and energy to ensuring that our children receive a proper education in a safe environment deserve to be able to do their work without fear for their safety.
“The Department takes these incidents seriously and is committed to using its authority and resources to discourage these threats, identify them when they occur, and prosecute them when appropriate,” he added. “In the coming days, the Department will announce a series of measures designed to address the rise in criminal conduct directed toward school personnel.”
This came after the National School Boards Association sent a letter to Biden claiming that “education leaders are under an immediate threat.” The NSBA went on to ask for federal law enforcement and other assistance in combatting what it claims to be a growing threat of violence in response to mask and vaccine mandates, as well as curriculum teaching critical race theory.
“Coupled with attacks against school board members and educators for approving policies for masks to protect the health and safety of students and school employees, many public school officials are also facing physical threats because of propaganda purporting the false inclusion of critical race theory within classroom instruction and curricula,” the NSBA said.
Attorney General Merrick Garland on Oct. 4 announced a concentrated effort to target any threats of violence, intimidation, and harassment by parents toward school personnel.
The announcement comes days after a national association of school boards asked the Biden administration to take “extraordinary measures” to prevent alleged threats against school staff that the association said was coming from parents who oppose mask mandates and the teaching of critical race theory.
Garland directed the FBI and U.S. attorneys in the next 30 days to convene meetings with federal, state, and local leaders within 30 days to “facilitate the discussion of strategies for addressing threats against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff,” according to a letter (pdf) the attorney general sent on Monday to all U.S. attorneys, the FBI director, the director of the Executive Office of U.S. Attorneys, and the assistant attorney general of the DOJ’s criminal division.
According to the DOJ, further efforts will be rolled out in the coming days, including a task force that will determine how to use federal resources to prosecute offending parents as well as how to advise state entities on prosecutions in cases where no federal law is broken. The Justice Department will also provide training to school staff on how to report threats from parents and preserve evidence to aid in investigation and prosecution.
“In recent months, there has been a disturbing spike in harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence against school administrators, board members, teachers, and staff who participate in the vital work of running our nation’s public schools,” Garland wrote. “While spirited debate about policy matters is protected under our Constitution, that protection does not extend to threats of violence or efforts to intimidate individuals based on their views.”
School boards across the nation have increasingly become an arena for heated debate over culture, politics, and health. Parents groups have ramped up pressure on boards over the teaching of critical race theory and the imposition of mask mandates. The debate is split sharply along political lines, with Democrats largely in favor of critical race theory and mask mandates, and Republicans opposing both.
Many of the meetings have turned heated. The amount and severity of the threats against officials are not known, but Garland’s letter suggests the phenomenon is widespread.
“Threats against public servants are not only illegal, they run counter to our nation’s core values,” Garland wrote. “Those who dedicate their time and energy to ensuring that our children receive a proper education in a safe environment deserve to be able to do their work without fear for their safety. The Department takes these incidents seriously and is committed to using its authority and resources to discourage these threats, identify them when they occur, and prosecute them when appropriate.”
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, has asked Attorney General Merrick Garland to explain why prosecutors have dropped a series of cases connected with the Justice Department’s (DOJ) clampdown on Chinese espionage.
In July, federal prosecutors filed motions to dismiss charges against six Chinese researchers who had been accused of hiding their ties to Chinese institutions or the Chinese military. The DOJ said at the time that “recent developments” in those cases had prompted the department to “re-evaluate these prosecutions,” stating that the dismissals were made “in the interest of justice.”
However, other reports have suggested that the decision to drop the charges was due to other reasons, such as the FBI’s failure to properly inform the accused of their rights against self-incrimination, Jordan wrote to Garland in a joint letter (pdf) with Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.) dated Sept. 27.
“It is not clear whether the Department dismissed these [charges] due to reported misconduct by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) or because the Department under your leadership is more invested in pursuing the far-left political goals of the Biden-Harris Administration than in protecting American national security interests,” the letter reads.
“These actions by the Department raise serious concerns about its commitment to confronting the national security threats posed by the People’s Republic of China.”
The letter comes days after the DOJ struck a deal with Huawei Chief Financial officer Meng Wanzhou allowing her to return to China, nearly three years after the executive was arrested in Canada at the request of U.S. prosecutors who had accused Meng of lying to HSBC, causing the bank to violate U.S. sanctions on Iran. The deal, which paved the way for the release of two Canadians held in China, has similarly prompted Republican lawmakers to question the Biden administration’s approach to confronting threats posed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
In recent years, the DOJ has, under a project called the “China Initiative,” aggressively pursued cases targeting the CCP’s expansive campaign of economic espionage against the United States. Academics, in particular, for the first time found themselves in the crosshairs over allegedly hiding their funding ties to the Chinese regime.
In 2020, there were at least six prosecutions against alleged undercover Chinese military officers posing as researchers at U.S. universities. But the department moved to drop five of those cases in July.
One of the cases was against Tang Juan, a researcher at the University of California–Davis, who allegedly hid her affiliations with the Chinese military in her visa application. She was arrested in July 2020 after being harbored by the Chinese Consulate in San Franciso for one month, according to prosecutors.
In another dropped case, the researcher, according to prosecutors, admitted under questioning by federal agents that he was instructed by his supervisor, the director of an unnamed military university lab in China, to “observe the layout of the UCSF [University of California–San Franciso] lab and bring back information on how to replicate it in China.”
In the letter, Jordan and Biggs requested the attorney general to provide details by Oct. 11 on why the department decided to drop the cases. The lawmakers also asked for information on the China Initiative, including the project’s staffing and resources and whether the department has any plans to “reform, prioritize, or reinforce its duties and responsibilities.”
“Especially at a time when President Biden’s disastrous foreign policy in Afghanistan has alienated allies and alarmed Americans, our country cannot afford the threat to the United States posed by Chinese espionage,” the letter reads.
DOJ officials didn’t respond to a request for comment by press time.
Huawei CFO Meng Wanzhou’s release a major priority for Beijing
The Biden administration is preparing to release the chief financial officer of Chinese spyware company Huawei in a deal brokered with Beijing, the Wall Street Journalreported Friday.
The Department of Justice negotiated the deal to release Meng Wanzhou, a Chinese national who was arrested by Canadian authorities upon American request in 2018. Federal courts charged Meng with financial fraud and trade espionage, which carries a prison sentence of up to 10 years.
China, however, continues to imprison two Canadian nationals—former diplomat Michael Kovrig and consultant Michael Spavor—whom Chinese authorities detained only days after Meng’s arrest in 2018. Experts have speculated that Beijing used the two Canadians as a potential bargaining chip for Meng’s release, but Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has so far ruled out any potential exchange involving Meng and the two citizens. Former secretary of state Mike Pompeo called China’s charges against Kovrig and Spavor “groundless” and “politically motivated.”
Meng was at the helm of Huawei, which has formed deep ties with the Chinese military and developed surveillance tools potentially used to spy on Uyghur Muslims, as it exploded in growth during the 2010s. Beijing summoned its American and Canadian ambassadors after Meng’s arrest, calling the charges “extremely vicious” and assuring “serious consequences” if Meng were not released.
A federal judge has rejected the Biden administration’s attempt to shelve the Texas anti-abortion “heartbeat” law that took effect Sept. 1.
The law has the effect of making it illegal to have abortions in Texas after about the sixth week of pregnancy — when the heartbeat of a baby can be detected. The law, which the U.S. Supreme Court allowed to take effect, allows citizens to bring complaints, in effect making them whistleblowers on behalf of the unborn.
On Tuesday, President Joe Biden’s Department of Justice made an emergency court filing demanding the law be blocked.
“The State of Texas adopted S.B. 81 to prevent women from exercising their constitutional rights,” the filing said, adding that “Texas has banned abortions months before viability — at a time before many women even know they are pregnant.”
“When other States have enacted laws abridging reproductive rights to the extent that S.B. 8 does, courts have enjoined enforcement of the laws before they could take effect. In an effort to avoid that result, Texas devised an unprecedented scheme that seeks to deny women and providers the ability to challenge S.B. 8 in federal court,” the filing said.
“Consistent with the Court’s previous Order, (Dkt. 12), that set a hearing on the United States’ Emergency Motion for a Temporary Restraining Order or Preliminary Injunction, (Dkt. 8), this case presents complex, important questions of law that merit a full opportunity for the parties to present their positions to the Court. Accordingly, IT IS ORDERED that the United States’ Opposed Motion for Expedited Briefing Schedule, (Dkt. 13), is DENIED,” the judge wrote.
Pitman, who was nominated to the bench by then-President Barack Obama in 2014, had earlier agreed that before he would rule on the federal motion to block the Texas law, he would hear arguments from both sides, setting a deadline of Oct. 1 for paperwork to be filed, according to Newsweek.
The Department of Justice did not want to wait that long and filed the request for action immediately, which Pitman rejected.
Since the law took effect, Texas abortion clinics have canceled appointments for abortions, according to The Texas Tribune.
“For all the bluster about Roe v. Wade being a matter of women’s rights, note how quickly clinics abandoned the clients they claim to champion once their profits were actually at stake,” wrote Roger Severino, senior fellow at the Ethics & Public Policy Center, in an Op-Ed for Newsweek on Thursday.
“So naturally, Planned Parenthood and other abortionists have asked their friends in the Biden administration to try again to block the law on their behalf so the cash can start flowing again,” he wrote.
Severino said that the Department of Justice was way off base legally when it suggested that the law made citizens into some form of legalized vigilantes.
“Giving citizens the power to sue and recover damages from lawbreakers doesn’t entitle them to carry some sort of Texas deputy badge. It doesn’t turn them into Dog the Bounty Hunter either,” he wrote. “Like other whistleblower laws, the Heartbeat Act merely incentivizes them to uncover and prove serious wrongdoing. And there are few wrongs more terrible than intentionally stopping an innocent child’s heart.
“Instead of waiting to see if a Texas citizen will bring an enforcement action with enough proof of a violation, DOJ seeks to enjoin every person in the state from filing a suit against any abortion clinic at the front end, no matter how egregious or blatant the violation.
“In the name of defending an invented constitutional right to abortion, Attorney General Merrick Garland wants to suspend an actual right found in the Constitution — the due process of law.”
As the Texas legal fight plays out, other states are watching.
Georgia Senate President Pro Tempore Butch Miller said Georgia might consider a similar law next year, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
The FDA shopped from a menu of aborted fetus organs to insert into lab mice as part of taxpayer-funded experiments, according to government records—a practice that watchdogs said may violate federal law.
From 2012 to 2018, Advanced Bioscience Resources, a nonprofit fetal tissue supplier, charged the FDA $340 per aborted fetus liver and $515 per intact skull. The FDA originally redacted these price listings, but a judge later unsealed the documents containing them, which were made public Tuesday by Judicial Watch. Federal law Bans any institution from profiting off the sale of aborted fetuses. Meredith Di Liberto, the lead attorney in the lawsuit to obtain the government records, said the unredacted documents reveal a clear line of business between the FDA and a leading fetal tissue provider.
“I don’t know how you get around that not being a violation of federal law,” Di Liberto told the Washington Free Beacon. “Why are they charging per organ? What work is involved that requires you to charge a separate cost for a thymus and a liver?”
Neither the FDA nor ABR responded to a request for comment.
The FDA study established human immune systems in mice with aborted fetus organs to test the effectiveness of pre-approved drugs. Scientists made specific requests to the supplier to keep the harvested organs “fresh” and “shipped on wet ice.” Abortion providers often charge fetal tissue providers the labor cost for harvesting the organs from an aborted fetus, but David Prentice, a professor of molecular genetics at the Catholic University of America, said the listed prices of fetal organs revealed in the contract are “ludicrous.”
“Basically you’re trafficking baby body parts using our taxpayer funds, and it’s being done at our federal agencies,” Prentice told the Free Beacon. “I think it’s an open question if they’re making a profit off of this tissue, and that obviously borders on the illegal.”
The DOJ began an investigation into ABR in 2017 after undercover videos from the Center for Medical Progress showed Planned Parenthood employees negotiating prices and methods of harvesting organs from aborted fetuses. The DOJ declined to comment on the investigation.
Two California medical companies were ordered to permanently close all business operations in a $7.8 million settlement in 2017 after a local district attorney found they were “viewing body parts as a commodity and illegally selling fetal tissues for valuable consideration.” David Daleiden, the founder of the Center for Medical Progress, said ABR should be shut down too for similar illegal behavior revealed in its contracts with the FDA.
“The federal court has found probable cause that ABR illegally trafficked baby body parts based on the records publicly available—it’s time for these cases to be filed now and for the human trafficking of aborted infants to stop,” Daleiden told the Free Beacon.
The Trump administration ended the FDA’s partnership with ABR in 2018. The administration stopped government scientists from conducting experiments on fetal organs and established an ethics committee to review all funding requests for fetal research. The Biden administration reestablished this research and dissolved the ethics committee in April, which Prentice said leaves reason to believe the FDA and other federal agencies have resumed purchasing fetal organs.
“It’s sad for science that the Biden administration did away with the ethical review—it moved science backward,” Prentice told the Free Beacon. “People’s eyes need to be opened and stomachs need to be churned to know this is going on and demand that it’s stopped. It’s antiquated science and medieval research.”
The National Institutes of Health gave at least $2.7 million in taxpayer money to the University of Pittsburgh to establish a “Pipeline” for fetal research that sought out minority babies. Another study funded by the NIH at the university took the scalps of aborted fetuses and grew them on rats.
Judicial Watch submitted the original FOIA request to the FDA in 2018. Di Liberto said the documents obtained Tuesday is the final information they were seeking after a series of lawsuits over three years. She said the continual refusal from the FDA to provide the requested information despite the termination of the ABR partnership leads her to believe this may not be the only instance of shady fetal organ purchases.
“If you’re the government and you don’t have a relationship with this organization, why are you redacting information unless you are covering up your own role in it? Maybe the problem is that it’s still going on—just not with this contractor,” Di Liberto told the Free Beacon.
Mehrdad Ansari sent advanced weapon parts to Islamic regime
An Iranian national convicted by a federal jury was sentenced Tuesday for sending the Islamic republic advanced military components used in nuclear weapons and missile guidance systems.
Mehrdad Ansari, a resident of the United Arab Emirates who is originally from Iran, was sentenced to 63 months in prison for circumventing U.S. sanctions on Iran through his distribution of sensitive military matériel. Ansari, who worked alongside Taiwanese citizen Susan Yip and Iranian citizen Mehrdad Foomanie to evade the American sanctions, over a four-year period obtained or tried to obtain more than 105,000 parts valued at more than $2.6 million.
American officials said the sentencing shows the Department of Justice will relentlessly pursue anyone who poses a threat to national security.
“Ansari and his co-conspirators attempted to profit from a far-reaching, extensive scheme to evade U.S. sanctions on Iran,” said National Security Division acting assistant attorney general Mark J. Lesko. “They repeatedly lied to numerous U.S. suppliers and illegally obtained very sensitive dual-use items. As demonstrated by this prosecution, DOJ pursues those who threaten U.S. national security, even years after their original crimes.”
The sentence comes on the heels of escalating tensions between Iran and the Biden administration. According to experts, Iran may in a month have enough material to build an atomic bomb. Successful Iranian nuclear weapons would likely reset diplomatic talks between the Biden administration and Tehran, which have stalled out in recent months as the president and his team work on another nuclear deal with the Islamic republic.
Two top House Republicans on the House Oversight Committee are demanding answers over the allegations that exiled Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country with $169 million in cash, as the Taliban terrorist group seized control of Kabul.
Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), the top Republican on the committee, and Rep. Glenn Grothman (R-Wis.), the ranking member on the National Security subcommittee, wrote a letter (pdf) to Attorney General Merrick Garland following accusations that Ghani took large sums of money with him as he departed the presidential palace.
“President Ghani may have been self-dealing with U.S. funds intended for the Afghan people, having fled the country with enormous sums of cash totaling well over a hundred million dollars. If true, this was not the dignified exit of a benevolent head of state, but that of a coward and grifter,” the lawmakers wrote.
Comer and Grothman said that the United States must do everything in its power to seize “any illicitly gained funds that were corruptly embezzled by President Ghani.”
“If he diverted funds from their intended purposes, the U.S. should bring him to justice,” the lawmakers said.
Ghani’s exit from the country on Aug. 15 allowed the Taliban to take the capital unopposed. He fled as the Islamist insurgents entered Kabul, saying he did so to avoid bloodshed.
The lawmakers called it “imperative that corrupt foreign government officials not be permitted to personally enrich themselves with U.S. taxpayer money,” and charged that Ghani’s actions contributed “to the speed with which the Taliban took over the country.”
“It is unclear how President Ghani obtained such a large sum of cash, but the amount and nature of his flight from Afghanistan raises the specter that President Ghani illegally and corruptly embezzled these funds from U.S. assistance intended for the Afghan people’s welfare and defense,” the Republican lawmakers continued.
Speaking from exile in the United Arab Emirates on Aug. 18, Ghani denied reports that he fled the country with large sums of money.
The pair concluded their letter with a list of questions the said they want answered by the Department of Justice (DOJ), including whether it is probing the matter, if the alleged sum came out of U.S. funding, and what action the DOJ intends to take to bring Ghani “to justice,” if he did “engage in corrupt actions…to enrich himself at the expense of the U.S. taxpayers.”
The Epoch Times has reached out to the DOJ for comment.
Months before he fled the country, Ghani claimed that his government could resist the terrorist group’s attacks without U.S. support, and that “no power in the world” could persuade him to get on a plane and leave the country.
“It is a country I love, and I will die defending,” he claimed in an interview with German news magazine Der Spiegel published on May 14.
The president’s words saw tens of thousands of Afghan families flee their homes hoping to find safety from the approaching Taliban in Kabul.
Afghan Vice President Amrullah Saleh has remained in the country following Ghani’s exit. He said on Twitter on Aug. 17 that he has remained to fulfill his duty as the “caretaker president” as outlined in the country’s constitution, adopted in 2004.
He has since vowed to resist the Taliban from the Panjshir Valley, together with Ahmad Shah Massoud, the son of a former anti-Soviet mujahedeen commander.
Comer and Grothman have asked for answers to their questions by Aug. 31, which is President Joe Biden’s self-imposed deadline to pull remaining U.S. troops from Afghanistan.
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